ABC/Image Group LA Friday night, Carrie Underwood and John Legend host the two-hour Grammys Greatest Stories: A 60th Anniversary Special on CBS.
Keith Urban is one of the stars who looks back on six decades of the biggest awards show in all of music, recalling an impromptu performance in 2009 that he’ll always remember.
“I think it was the Grammys where Rihanna and Chris Brown couldn’t be there, let’s just say,” Keith begins. “And so they were scrambling to figure out how to fill that slot. And [producer] Ken Ehrlich had called Justin Timberlake and said, ‘Can you do this Al Green song with Al, and can you put a band together quickly?’”
Keith continues: “And I was just hanging around in the afternoon. I was just there for rehearsal for my own thing. And Justin came in and he goes, ‘Can you play on this song?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure. Yeah. Why not?’”
Once the show started, things got even more surreal.
“The next thing, I’m on stage with him and Boyz II Men and Al Green and I was looking around at the stage going, ‘Man, I would never in a million years think this would happen,’” the Australian superstar admits.
“And I say this because this is one of those things that would never happen in your life: I played a little solo and stepped back in the band, we finished the song on the night, and I walk off and I walk past Paul McCartney, and he goes ‘Hey, nice solo man!’” Keith says, imitating the former Beatles’ accent. “And then he just walked off. And I just stood there going, ‘I could die. I’ll just die, right here and right now. Done.’”
Grammys Greatest Stories premieres Friday at 9 p.m. ET on CBS.
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