Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman at home in Nashville, Tennessee
What do Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman get up to in their Nashville bunker?
It was a rare moment of joy in the otherwise torturous One World: Together at Home, the global livestream where rock and pop singers sang from the imprisonment of their palatial residences. Pop-country superstar Keith Urban cloned himself twice to accompany himself on a rendition of Steve Winwood’s Higher Love – with a surprise appearance from his wife. Who happens to be Nicole Kidman. Rather than join the band, however, the star of Big Little Lies and countless Hollywood movies limited her role to giving one of the Keiths a peck on the cheek.
“Doing home concerts has always been part of the picture. Now it is the picture,” Urban says down the line from his house in Nashville, Tennessee, where he, Kidman and their daughters Sunday, 11, and Faith, nine, have been confined since the beginning of March, initially after a tornado hit the city and then for the same reason as the rest of us. “I’ve got a studio in the basement, there is a warehouse for the band’s equipment that we shot Higher Love in, and it felt right to include Nic in the film because that’s the reality we’re all in right now. We’re all stuck at home with our families.”
Urban has released 10 solo albums, nine of which have sold more than a million copies. In Nashville he’s the one who gets stopped in the street, not Kidman. If he weren’t stuck at home he would be out on the road playing his new single, Polaroid, which brings a touch of Ed Sheeran-like acoustic lightness to his sound. He says that while most actors want to be musicians and most musicians want to be actors, that isn’t the case for Kidman and him. It may be why her musical input has been confined to dancing about a bit on a livestream he’s been doing during the lockdown called Urban Underground and contributing backing vocals to his 2017 #MeToo anthem Female. As for Urban’s acting, he did a shoot for Playgirl magazine in 2001, but that’s about it.
“I have zero interest in acting. Nic has zero interest in being a musician. It makes for a harmonious flow in our house,” says Urban, 52, the kind of sunny sort who won’t let a trifle like a global pandemic get him down. “But there’s no question that Nic has been a huge influence on my creativity, simply for the way she approaches things in such a bold way. Curiosity makes her go toward something regardless of whether she thinks she can do it or not.”
Urban says his 2013 album Fuse, on which he broke away from country music to bring in tinges of R&B and electronic pop, was a direct result of Kidman’s “do it now, worry later” philosophy. “As a musician you can try anything that is of interest and I started doing that with Fuse, really as a result of seeing how Nic approaches things. My dad would say, ‘If you get asked if you can do something, say yes, then learn really quick.’ Nic will agree to a project and then go, ‘Oh shit. Now I’m going to have to actually work out how to do this.’”
In February I saw Urban headline at an annual benefit concert he stages for Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame called All For the Hall. With his longish blond hair, clean-cut handsomeness and tattooed biceps stretching his black T-shirt, he looked very much the all-American boy. He also has a back catalogue of hits that captures the essence of American working-class life; a platinum-selling single from 2016 called John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16 lists such quintessentials as Pepsi-Cola, Marilyn Monroe and TV dinners on a plastic tray. None of this would be odd for a Nashville star, except that Urban was born in New Zealand and raised in Australia. He met Kidman in 2005 at a Hollywood event promoting Australian culture called G’Day LA.
“It came from my dad,” Urban says of his love for country. His father Robert ran a convenience store in Caboolture, Queensland. “When I grew up in the ’70s Dad loved Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, which I would listen to, so I picked up a guitar at six. At 12 I was in a band. At 15 I left school and played gigs five nights a week. I never thought about it. Even when I came to America at 22 I had no back-up plan.”
When did he know that he wanted to do this for a living? “Er ... last Tuesday? The only parallel I can think of is asking someone, ‘When you started walking, did you decide to do it for the rest of your life?’ For me it was that natural.”
Being an Australian with a schooling in pub bands made Urban an odd fit in Nashville, where singers work with session musicians, producers and songwriters, not regular groups. “I was used to rough Aussie pubs filled with drunken people who don’t give a shit, where you had to perform with intensity and passion to get anything across,” he says. “I came to Nashville and turned up at places like [reverential songwriters’ listening room] the Bluebird Cafe and everyone went, ‘Who the f..k is this?’ I had been playing for 10 years by the time I came to Nashville, but I had to start from the beginning again. I had to prove my country cred.”
Urban’s secret was to bring a sense of eternal innocence to material that slotted easily into mainstream pop and country radio. Songs such as We Were Us and Wasted Time hark back to the simple joys of adolescence, of summer nights spent on the porch, not worrying about anything.
“Actually I’m not wishing back to that time,” Urban says when I point this out. “I want to live like that now. Like with Nic, we have a passionate, curious and hungry togetherness. She has infinite dimensions that keep her fascinating to me, and in the way we live our lives she could be my high school girlfriend. People give in to age too fast. I always think, ‘If you didn’t know how old you were, how old would you be?’ I’m sure Mick Jagger doesn’t feel like he’s in his seventies. What I’m actually saying on Wasted Time is: remember how good it was back then? It is the same now. You can drive down the highway with the windows down and the radio on and it feels as good as it ever did.”
Some things do change, though, one of them being Urban’s lifestyle. He describes the second half of the ’90s, when he fell into heavy cocaine use while touring with his old band the Ranch, as “just awful”. It took an intervention from Kidman in 2006, a few months after they married, for Urban to get clean. You might guess that Polaroid, with its words about meeting someone special at “a party I hated”, was about encountering Kidman and escaping his old life. As it turns out, he didn’t write the lyrics.
“I can relate to them though,” he says. “In the ’90s I lived in a house with my band in Nashville and we had tons of crazy parties, we took Polaroids and stuck them on the wall, and there would be nights where you ended up at someone’s house and you don’t even know how you got there. I don’t live the way I did 20 years ago, that’s for sure.”
These days Urban’s tours involve sharing “a really nice tour bus with Nic and the girls, and making an RV trip of it”, which they were meant to be doing in Europe right now. Instead he’s stuck in Nashville, putting the finishing touches to an album due for release later this year, which he has found himself in danger of tinkering with endlessly as a result of the lockdown.
“As Nic says, you have to have an opening night otherwise you would just rehearse forever,” Urban says. “And as much as I hate deadlines and release dates, you do need them otherwise you’ll never finish anything. It is just difficult to plan anything right now because we’re in uncharted territory.”
His video concerts may be a welcome distraction but Urban says he’s missing live shows. “The artist plays, the audience reacts, and the combination of the two makes a third thing that can only happen on that night, in that venue,” he says. “I’d happily go back to playing in a bar in front of two people because that’s my world. I wasn’t raised in front of a camera.”
On that note, Urban concludes our interview with a very short, rather sad joke. “A guy walks into a bar ... Lucky bastard.”