He may not still call Australia home, but Keith Urban’s ‘always Aussie in spirit’
The country star has lived in Nashville longer than he’s lived anywhere else. What he misses from home? The bluntness of an Aussie crowd.
By Ed Potton
Keith Urban backstage during a festival in Nashville, Tennessee, last year. He says his songs always have their roots in real people: “I’m not creating something completely fictional.”Credit: Getty Images
I t’s a beautiful morning in Keith Urban’s backyard in Nashville and the country star is politely telling me to naff off. “I just don’t want to give you guys a headline about my wife, Ed,” Urban says, his Australian accent unsoftened despite 30 years in Tennessee. It must be galling for a man who has sold 20 million records, sung with Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton and the Rolling Stones, and has just released High, his new album of stonking, hook-filled country-pop, to be constantly asked about his other half. When that woman is Nicole Kidman, however, it’s kind of inevitable.
Not that being married to one of the biggest stars in the world is all bad. Urban was already a success when he started dating Kidman in the summer of 2005, with four Academy of Country Music awards and one of his five albums making the Top Ten in America. Yet a cynic might point out that since they got together he has won four Grammys and enjoyed all seven of his subsequent albums hitting the Top Ten.
Urban, 56, is not the first male star to be eclipsed by a female partner; think of Sean Penn and Madonna, Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry and pretty much every boyfriend of Swift. In contrast to most of these relationships, though, Urban and Kidman’s marriage is seen as very solid.
Still, although he is the bigger draw in places like Nashville, does he mind playing second fiddle to her elsewhere? He chooses to answer a different question, so it’s tempting to take that as a yes. “Well, obviously there’s a lot of places I haven’t put as much time into touring in. We’re gonna get to play a lot of those places and we can start to build those audiences as well.”
Kidman’s mother, Janelle, died a few days before we speak. “Yeah, everybody’s good, man. Thank you for asking,” Urban says, making it clear that’s all he has to say, which is fair enough. On, then, to the new album, which is called High partly in a nod to his past drink and drugs issues – he has been clean and sober for almost 20 years. “Obviously, with my past it’s got a dark humour to it. I imagined someone hearing my album and asking someone, ‘Hey, have you heard Keith Urban’s High?’ ”
His father, who owned a convenience store, was an alcoholic, and Urban has said that he used to kid himself that his drinking was under control because it wasn’t as bad as his old man’s. It did get bad, though.
“I just discovered that I’m allergic to it – that’s probably the best way for me to describe it,” he says. It’s said that, four months into their marriage in 2006, Kidman staged an intervention that led to him checking into rehab. “She really should’ve just walked,” he once said.
Keith Urban says he’s “very” proud of Kidman’s second wind on the likes of Big Little Lies but won’t discuss her.Credit: Getty Images
In his 2009 song Thank You, he sang: “I was in too deep, I’d gone too far – I thank you for my life / and I thank God for grace and mercy / and that you became my wife.” He bristles at my mentioning the intervention. “It all becomes clickbait to you guys real quick. I’d really love to move on from that because before you know it the interview would be ‘My wife saved my life’ and I don’t want to go there.”
Wildside, one of the most rollicking songs on the album, was partly inspired by the bit in the film School of Rock where Joan Cusack’s strait-laced headmistress gets drunk. “I always loved that scene; two tequilas and she’s up on the table singing [Stevie Nicks’] Edge of Seventeen,” Urban says. “A lot of my audience is like that, particularly here in Nashville: good Christian girls who are very strait-laced five days a week and then on a Friday night this whole other person comes out.”
He sings about booze in an enticing, dare one say wistful, way. What does he miss about his drinking days? “I don’t miss anything,” he says. “I’m very grateful I went through it; I’m even more grateful I got through it. I have nothing against drinking, drugs, booze, chemicals, whatever the hell anybody wants to do. I serve alcohol in the house. I’ve been around it for 18 years and I have zero interest in it.”
Born in New Zealand and brought up in Queensland, Urban moved to Nashville in 1992 after establishing himself on the Australian country scene. In 2000 he had his first big hit in the US with Your Everything. “I’ve lived in Nashville longer than anywhere I’ve ever lived, so it’s very much home for me,” he says. “Both of our girls were born here, so it’s their home town.”
He’s referring to his daughters with Kidman, Sunday Rose, 16, and Faith Margaret, 13, who was born via a surrogate. Kidman also has two adopted children, Bella, 31, and Connor, 29, from her marriage to Tom Cruise, which ended in 2001.
Urban with Nicole Kidman (at right), and (from left) their daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret and her niece Sybella Hawley.Credit: FilmMagic
There is a bluntness to Urban. He has Australian, American and New Zealand passports, but “will always feel Aussie in spirit. Our Aussie humour is a good mix of English and its own sort of local larrikinism.” Australians have “no problem telling you that you suck”, he says, remembering an early gig. “This guy comes up to me and goes, ‘Hey, that first song, did you write that?’ I went, ‘I did,’ and he goes, ‘Yeah, that was shit. What about the one after that?’ I went, ‘Well, actually I wrote that one, too.’ He goes, ‘That one was better.’ I love that because I take shit on the chin pretty good.” When he became a judge on American Idol and the Australian version of The Voice, he tried to be “a bit more compassionate”.
Did he and Kidman – who met in 2005 at G’Day LA, an event to champion Australian culture in California – bond over being Aussies working in American-dominated fields? “Well, I mean, coming from the same place is very helpful. But being in different fields was also equally helpful. Yet both being artists was a good thing.”
Urban once said that Kidman has never wanted to be a musician and he has never wanted to act. Doesn’t his music involve role-playing, though? “Hit the gas!” he sings in a Texan drawl on Straight Line, another song on the new album, before singing of fleeing Hotel California in a getaway car. On Heart Like a Hometown, “memories hang like jerseys in a high school gym” – all-American nostalgia from a man who grew up thousands of kilometres from the US. “There’s definitely parts of me in a lot of these songs and if I’m singing about somebody else, then it’s somebody I know,” he says. “I’m not creating something completely fictional.”
He has been accepted into the country world, he says. “There’s definitely a sense of community – when I go to award shows it feels like you’re competing against your brother and sister. And when they win and you don’t, you get pissed off, but they’re still your brother and sister.” Urban has played with the biggest names in country, including Swift, who supported him on tour in 2009 and invited him to appear on a re-recorded version of her song That’s When (Taylor’s Version) in 2021.
Urban and his former support act Taylor Swift in 2015. He says her past trials by fire from critics only helped make her stronger.Credit: Getty Images
“It’s been remarkable watching Taylor grow in public because it’s pretty brutal,” he says. “It feels like now people have long forgotten all of the shit she had to go through with sub-par Grammy performances [Swift’s singing at the 2010 ceremony was described by one writer as “off-key”] and critics slamming her. Just trial by fire over and over – and always getting stronger for it. When she opened for us, I watched her perform and I’m, like, ‘Oh, this girl has her sights way past this thing.’ ” Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris in the US presidential election; is Urban tempted to do the same? “I’m often amazed that people don’t look to artists’ work –they’re pretty clear on who they are and their views, and I’m no different. [Look at] all the artists I’ve collaborated with [these include Pink and Nelly Furtado], the kind of music I make. I play to extremely diverse audiences in every way, politically and pronoun, age groups, ethnicity.” This suggests strongly that he’s a Harris man, although he won’t say. “Oh god, no.”
Back to Kidman, then. She has said she considered retiring after having children with Urban, but has had a glorious second wind on prestige TV shows including Big Little Lies and The Undoing. How proud is he of her for that? “Very,” he says, but this is the last straw. “We’ve had the best conversation about my career and my music and I love that at the very end of this conversation you’re going to give one more swing to see if I’ll talk about my wife. I’m not going to talk about her.”
I admit defeat and leave him to the lovely Tennessee morning.
This is an edited version of a story that first appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine/News Licensing
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