Trivia / Keith Urban

• Breakthrough Hit: Although his first album went platinum and produced three big hits (the #1 "But for the Grace of God" and the Top 5 hits "Your Everything" and "Where the Blacktop Ends"), he didn't really break through until "Somebody Like You". A fairly long hiatus between "Blacktop" and "Somebody Like You" helped, as did the fact that the latter was named by Billboard as the biggest country hit of the 2000-2010 decade.
• Chart Displacement:
  • On the country charts, "Stupid Boy" and "Cop Car" remain among his most popular despite reaching only #3 and #8 respectively. On the Hot 100, his highest peak is "Kiss a Girl", a long-forgotten single whose high ranking was due entirely to a one-week sales spike after he performed it on a season finale of American Idol; it got no crossover whatsoever and would have only peaked in the 50s otherwise.
  • Conversely, his longest-lasting #1 airplay hit is not "Somebody Like You" or "Making Memories of Us", but rather the far less-remembered "Better Life". This is because the latter benefited greatly from a very weak chart — lots of bigger hits had cleared out behind it, and no immediate competition was behind it to dethrone it.
• Creator Couple: With Nicole Kidman.
• Creator Breakdown / Creator Recovery: Having just come out of rehab before Golden Road, Urban shows a great deal of optimism on that album, especially in the upbeat lead single "Somebody Like You" which contains such optimistic lyrics as "It sure feels good to finally feel the way I do." Be Here continues with the optimsm, but also shows the demons creeping back in on tracks like "Tonight I Wanna Cry". After another trip to rehab and his marriage to Nicole Kidman, he has taken refuge mostly in uptempos about how happy he is to be in love, with the second recovery taking place around Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For some reason, Greatest Hits: 19 Kids (the re-release of Greatest Hits: 18 Kids) isn't on iTunes, so this is the only way to get the single version of "You Look Good in My Shirt". Likewise, the re-recorded radio version of "Where the Blacktop Ends" was not commercially available until 18 Kids.
• Product Placement: "John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16" not only mentions the titular tractor, but also Pepsi, which Urban promoted in a series of Pepsi-sponsored concerts between 2013 and 2015 (the song was released in 2016). ^note  Texaco, Chevrolet, and Superman are mentioned, too.
• Production Posse: Jerry Flowers, a former bandmate from the Ranch days, has appeared on nearly all of his albums and is a member of his road band.
• Sleeper Hit: "The Fighter" became this in Australia.
• Throw It In!:
  • "Little Bit of Everything" is a double example. The "stuttering" ukulele part was thrown in by Nathan Chapman due to the demo track also using a ukulele, and it was chopped up at Urban's request to mix it up a little. Also, the bass line is played on a synth because the first two bassists that they contacted were unavailable, and even though Urban can also play bass, Chapman suggested using a synth instead. The latter doubles as a Serendipity Writes the Plot.
  • Bass parts are apparently becoming susceptible to this: he played his own bass line on "John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16" after seeing a bass guitar hanging on the studio wall, and initially chose to have the line replaced by a session bassist, but ultimately left his own bass playing in the final mix.

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