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Variety
  • 10/11/2024
Country singer-songwriter Keith Urban guesses the lyrics to some of his most famous songs, such as 'Blue Ain't Your Color,' 'Somebody Like You,' 'The Fighter,' and more!

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00:00It's like the big reveal.
00:01They should get tougher at this point, right?
00:05Man, you're going deep on me.
00:07This is humiliation right here on camera.
00:13If I were a painter, I wouldn't change you.
00:15I'd just paint you bright, baby.
00:17That's a blue-anchor color.
00:19If I were a painter, I wouldn't change you.
00:22I'd just paint you bright.
00:25I've always had a romantic heart.
00:27Yeah, I wrote poetry when I was in second, third, fourth grade.
00:31Probably about whatever my girlfriend crush was, even at that age.
00:35So yeah, always been romantic.
00:37When we recorded Blue-Anchor Color, I think it was the fifth single off my Ripcord album.
00:42I loved the song.
00:43I never in a million years thought it would catch fire the way it did.
00:46It's extraordinary.
00:47I started playing guitar when I was six.
00:50My mum and dad gave me a ukulele when I was four.
00:53And my dad, who was a drummer, said that I could strum it in time with songs on the radio.
00:58So he thought, well, it's got rhythm.
01:01If he can just learn some chords, this whole thing will go together.
01:04So I turned six, got a teacher, and she taught me basic chords.
01:09And I just took to it.
01:10I was hoping to get into a band one day.
01:13Sometimes it's hard for me to understand that you're teaching me to be a better man.
01:17That is somebody like you.
01:22It's a career-changing song for me.
01:29It was the first single off an album called Golden Road.
01:32It stayed at number one for like eight weeks and became the biggest country song of the 2000s.
01:40And again, just shocked that it connected the way it did and still does when we do it in concert.
01:47I still see it resonating like we just wrote it.
01:50It's crazy.
01:51Oh, I had to lose a guy in 10 days.
01:53Yes, it was.
01:54I forgot about that.
01:55Well, I saw the film because they asked if I would recut a new vocal for the song and do a remix,
02:02which eliminated the banjo and had me replace it with electric guitar for the riff,
02:07re-sing the vocal with a little more grit.
02:10It was a strange process having to re-sing it because I was in Nashville in a studio,
02:16and there were the film producers out here in LA.
02:19I'm in Nashville at the vocal mic in the studio with all these people in my headphones
02:24telling me how to sing the song.
02:26It was the weirdest, strangest thing I've ever done.
02:32He didn't know what he had, and I thank God.
02:34That's from The Fighter.
02:35Boy, he didn't give me a long run-up there either.
02:42While I was in the gym in the morning, this song, this idea of this,
02:47what if I something or other, I'll never, but what if I...
02:50The idea of a guy and a girl having this conversation,
02:53just the fears of the beginning of a relationship.
02:57How can I trust this person?
02:58And the person reassuring, and that fear, reassurance, fear, reassurance,
03:03really appealed to me as a song.
03:05And I felt like I had so much of this in my head.
03:08We wrote that song, 20 minutes, 30 minutes.
03:12It was just truth, just total truth.
03:15Using a lot of things that had come up in my conversation early on with my wife as well.
03:20It all made its way into that song.
03:21And then Carrie Underwood just killed it.
03:23And I always wanted to sing with her as well.
03:25I've never been the kind to ever let my feelings show.
03:28And I thought that being strong meant never losing your self-control.
03:31As tonight, I want to cry.
03:32I've never been the kind to ever let my feelings show.
03:40Many, many things make me emotional.
03:43The most unexpected things can make me emotional,
03:46a commercial on TV or some weird moment can do it for me.
03:52I remember writing it with my co-writer, Monty Powell.
03:55And it was a different time in my life when I was going through a lot of drinking.
04:02And I think I showed up at that writing session with a bottle of wine
04:07at about 10 in the morning.
04:09And that actually made it into the lyric.
04:12It's something about me with red wine, I think something.
04:15Because it's what I was doing at the time, sitting at the piano.
04:18Yeah, those songs came from, they came from a real place.
04:21A lot of guys say to me that they have, guys have trouble crying.
04:26Being allowed to, I think.
04:28It's an old-fashioned sort of thing.
04:31Thank God that that's not that case anymore.
04:33But there's still a lot of stereotypical ways of raising boys
04:37where they're not allowed to cry.
04:39And you've got to suck it up and take it on the chin.
04:41And it's bullshit.
04:42I mean, you should absolutely, you have to cry.
04:45And sometimes a song will do that.
04:46And I've had people say to me, you know,
04:49I heard that song in the car one night and just lost it, you know.
04:53All right.
04:55They should get tougher at this point, right?
04:57Take your records, take your freedom.
04:59Take your memories, I don't need them.
05:00That's You'll Think of Me off of Golden Road.
05:09Resonated with me when, you know, I didn't write this song.
05:11But the very first time I heard it, I got sent the song
05:14by Daryl Brown, who's one of the writers.
05:16It floored me with the very strong imagery.
05:19And then the only thing I will say about the imagery is over the years,
05:22I've had more people say to me, is it cat or is it cap?
05:27Take your cap and leave my sweater.
05:29And they're like, no, it's cat.
05:30Take your cat and leave my sweater.
05:32The guy didn't want the cat to begin with.
05:34He was just putting up with the cat.
05:35But he liked the sweater.
05:37Okay.
05:39You didn't like that I came home late 4am, but it's a Friday, babe.
05:42That's one too many with pink.
05:44And I love this song too.
05:47You didn't like that I came home late 4am, but it's a Friday, babe.
05:54Loved getting to do a song with Pink.
05:56I've wanted to do that.
05:57She's been on my bucket list forever because I just love her voice.
06:00I love her whole swag.
06:01Pink was so great.
06:02When we filmed the video, I asked if she would also film a separate thing
06:07that I could use on the big video wall behind me so she could duet with me
06:10in concert, and she did that.
06:11So she's been dueting with me for many years since the song came out.
06:17You've Always Got a Place to Put Down Some Roots or Spend a Holiday.
06:20That is Heart Like a Hometown on the new album High.
06:31Again, a song I didn't write, but I got sent it by one of the writers.
06:35It just spoke to me immediately.
06:36I knew the song.
06:37I just felt it.
06:39I felt it the same way I felt You'll Think of Me.
06:41I come from a small town and wanted to go to America and pursue bigger dreams.
06:49A lot of people that come to Nashville come from small towns.
06:53It can be a real battle between leaving people you know, places you know,
06:59the whole familiarity and grounding and safety net of a hometown and going
07:03somewhere bigger, Los Angeles, New York, wherever, to pursue your life,
07:08and being torn between what you left behind.
07:12It's a really beautiful song.
07:26I love summer songs.
07:27I love summer.
07:29I come from a place that feels a lot like LA.
07:31The East Coast of Australia is totally like the West Coast here.
07:34Pacific Ocean.
07:35Very similar vibe.
07:36Especially like San Diego.
07:38It's probably a little more like where I'm from.
07:40It's very beachy, very summer.
07:42I've always gravitated towards summer songs, especially sing-along type summer songs.
08:01Another song I wrote with Monty Powell.
08:02We wrote a lot of songs.
08:05Sweet Things started out as the opening guitar riff.
08:08I write a lot with drum machines.
08:10The drum machine thing had this, had this skip thing, had this skipped snare thing
08:18happening every other time and I liked it so I just let it play and then created a guitar riff
08:24with it and then Monty's a very good storyteller so he concocted this whole story about Uncle
08:30Jake's Mustang.
08:31I had just been given a Mustang for my second year anniversary, 69, and I probably drove
08:37it that day to the writing session so when he was looking for a car to put in the song
08:41he just looked out the window.
08:44Thank goodness I didn't get given a Toyota Corolla.
08:51Oh, I know this song.
08:53Now this is stumping me.
08:55I feel like, oh my gosh, like this is humiliation right here on camera in front of
09:01all you guys.
09:03You've momentarily short-circuited my brain because obviously it's not a song that we
09:07do a lot.
09:08Oh, It's Only You because it's from my very first solo album.
09:18I probably haven't sung that song in forever, like umpteen years.
09:24Wow, how obscure.
09:25How did you even find that song?
09:27That kid's going to figure it all out.
09:29It's going to take longer than he thinks, so I sure ain't going to tell him that.

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