Keith Urban stars in Get Closer tour at Key Arena

Keith Urban is bringing his Get Closer tour to Seattle’s Key Arena on Thursday.

In the past, he’s toured with some high-powered openers: Carrie Underwood in 2008 and Taylor Swift in 2009. Crowds at both of those shows were huge – at capacity or very close.

This time, he’s not sharing the bill, and while KeyArena is not sold out, his Top 20 concert tour is packing them in. Only single seats are available for the lower level of the arena.

Urban is a country star who has been elevated to the status of pop-culture celebrity, thanks in part to his marriage to actress and fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman.

He is also among the few frontmen who could survive as a studio or touring musician if his singer/songwriter career failed him. Like Brad Paisley, he is a ringer on the guitar.

He gave his fans all of everything during a recent Kansas City stop: a set list packed with hits, a few well-known covers (including some Tom Petty and John Mellencamp) and lots of lead-guitar pyro, sometimes while he was also singing lead vocals. His four-piece band was just as impressive.

And Urban gave his crowd some rock-star moments. He left the main stage a few times to perform at satellite microphones/platforms planted among the crowd. Once, like a prize fighter and his entourage entering the ring, he hiked from the main stage across the arena through the fawning crowd on the floor up to the middle of the lower level seats, where he sang a tune and then signed and gave away the guitar he was playing.

That was one of the bigger moments in a show that lasted two and a quarter hours, a show that had its familiar moments and a show that saved the best for last.

During the first half of the Kansas City show, the mood in the place was percolating at best. There was loud applause or cheers of recognition for some songs, and plenty of singing-along, but not a lot of raucous energy. Granted, that was also the portion of the show when he did a few solo-acoustic numbers. It also contained more of his newer materlai.

The mood changed about the time Urban hand-picked two women and a guy to climb up the stage ramps and help sing “Kiss a Girl.” It gave the show a small bit of unscripted reality.

The levity seemed to break the mood. The second half had several infernal moments, like “Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me” and then his band intros, in which three of his band mates stepped up and covered bits of well-known songs: U2’s “With or Without You,” Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and AC/DC’s “Long Way to the Top.”

The fiery encore included a cover of Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” with Owen and then one of Urban’s biggest and best-loved songs, “Better Life.”

Here is a typical set list: Put You In a Song; Days Go By; I Told You So; Raining on Sunday; Long Hot Summer; Stupid Boy; Silly Love Songs/Making Memories of Us; Jeans On; You’ll Think of Me; Georgia Woods; ‘Til Summer Comes Around; Sweet Thing; Kiss A Girl; Without You; Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me. Band intros/medley: With Or Without You; American Girl; It’s a Long Way to the Top; You Look Good In My Shirt. Encore: Tonight I Wanna Cry; Jack and Diane; Better Life.