Keith Urban’s Hard Road
He said, ‘Look, kid, I don’t make the fucking rules. You choose, fiddle or steel. I don’t give a shit.’ Those two years were full of moments like that.” The album tanked and the band split up, which led Urban into yet another downward spiral. In 1998, however, he fell in with a simpatico producer named Matt Rollings; together, they created his first solo album, released the next year, which got him his first hit songs.
“Capitol presented it as ‘We’re giving you one chance as a solo artist,'” says Rollings. “We turned some tracks in and they said, ‘Let’s do this.’ His timing couldn’t have been better. I don’t know if he was the anti-Garth, but he certainly wasn’t like Garth. His intuition is amazing. He saw his opening and went right through it.”
Right now, Urban is on the phone with Kidman, then wandering off to eat a chicken sandwich. He says he talks to her “multiple times a day,” which makes perfect sense. She’s been his salvation. He’d entered rehab twice before, only to relapse, but when she staged an intervention in 2006, he left home for three months of inpatient hard work and returned dedicated to his sobriety. The only residue of those last few saturated days is guilt over what he put her through. “I caused the implosion of my fresh marriage,” he says. “It survived, but it’s a miracle it did. I was spiritually awoken with her. I use the expression ‘I was born into her,’ and that’s how I feel. And for the first time in my life, I could shake off the shackles of addiction.”
On the one hand, that his rejection by Nashville could lead to multiple addictions resonates in a certain apt way; on the other, it seems oddly incomplete, like he’s skating around something, and the obvious place to look for it is back in his childhood, which he’s always presented as anything but fraught. Just yesterday, he’d said his only traumas as a kid revolved around his parents moving a lot. But maybe today it’ll be different.
If he could change anything about the way he was raised, what would it be?
He doesn’t hesitate. “I’d like to have been raised in a much more intimate house.”
What’s that mean?
He tilts his head, scuffs his feet. “My dad was an alcoholic, and I grew up in an alcoholic’s house. No intimacy.”
Was he abusive?
“My recollection is that he was a physical disciplinarian. Ten years ago, I would have said, ‘He never did anything I didn’t deserve.’ Now I realize it’s not about deserving it.” He leans forward, says, “I don’t recall him ever telling me he loved me as a kid. I’d do a gig I thought was fantastic and the only thing he’d say is, ‘When you speak onstage, you’ve got to slow down.’ He never commented on anything else. And the way he disciplined me, he seemed to have forgotten about it as he got older. I don’t think he was in denial, he genuinely had no recollection. ‘Hitting you? I never did that!'” This comes as a bit of a shock, mainly because Urban has never publicly mentioned it before, and it does explain a few things: his love of performing, and then, years later, in Nashville, how destructive it was for him when he stopped playing on a stage. And even why he plays country music at all. “[My dad] was into it, and I wanted his approval,” Urban says. “I feel very sure if he’d been into African music, I’d be living in Zimbabwe, having the same talk about ‘Wow, they must have thought you were strange when you got to this town.'”
He pauses, exhales. He’s going back in time, to 1998, seven years since he released his four hit records in Australia, five years since that girl called him a novelty, another long year away from success. He was at a house out in Franklin, about 20 miles south of Nashville, staring at a big pile of coke, about to embark on another one of his binges, which is how he used to roll – a few days or weeks off, then blammo.
“I had plenty of stuff,” he says. “I didn’t seem able to stop. There was no stopping this time. I’d go to sleep, wake up a couple of hours later, go at it again, drinking to take the edge off. I remember thinking, ‘I’m probably not going to make it until tomorrow.’ And then I thought, ‘Fuck it. I really don’t care. It’ll be a relief to not have to. I’ll take an Ambien and at some point I’ll pass.’ I was taking everything. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, good, this is the end of it, yahoo.’ I was quite happy about it.” He leans back in his chair, smiles and shrugs. “Well, I woke up the next day at lunchtime, in my bed, sweating, going, ‘Fuck! Guess I’m not going to get to go this way.’ I thought the choice to quit would be taken from me, which would be easier than me trying to do it on my own. There was coke left, so I went at it again.”