Keith Urban Channeled a Better Version of Himself With This Early Hit From 2002

In 2002, Keith Urban had his second No. 1 hit, with “Somebody Like You“. Written by Urban and John Shanks, the song appears on Urban’s Golden Road album.

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“Somebody Like You” sounds like a feel-good, positive anthem. The song says, “And I’m letting go of all my lonely yesterdays / I’ve forgiven myself for the mistakes I’ve made / Now there’s just one thing / The only thing I wanna do / I wanna love somebody / Love somebody like you / Yeah, I wanna feel the sunshine / Shining down on me and you / When you put your arms around me / You let me know there’s nothing in this world I can’t do.”

Urban, who dated supermodel Niki Taylor around the time “Somebody Like You” was released, later reveals how much the song backfired on him, in the best way possible.

“I would write these songs about love and relationships,” he says (via Songfacts). “I remember writing ‘Somebody Like You’, and I remember playing it for my girlfriend at the time. And she just looked at me and said, ‘You’re a f—ing hypocrite’, and I couldn’t argue that. And I realized I was writing from all these places of the kind of person I wished I could be. I wasn’t that person, but I wanted to be. It was only a song, but my real life was a disaster.”

How Keith Urban Wrote “Somebody Like You” With John Shanks

Urban was still relatively new to country music, at least in the United States, when he wrote “Somebody Like You”. Several years before he got sober, Urban recalls flying to Los Angeles to write with Shanks and arriving at the writing session a bit impaired.

“I swing by the Irish Pub at 9:00 a.m. and had a pint of Guinness, and that was really good,” he remembers.”So I had a second one, and that was even better, so I had a third one, just to be sure, and then I went to my writing session.”

Urban and Shanks got the melody and the choruses done. When Urban went to his hotel, he drank an entire bottle of Crown Royal while writing the first and second verses. Still, although Urban was intoxicated for most of the song’s creation, he is still fond of the way it turned out.

 “It was one those pretty easy to write songs,” Urban says. “And I think it’s just where I was in my life at the time, too. It really captured probably more of the person I wished I could be. I wasn’t that person in the song, but I wanted to be, and I felt I was getting close to being that person. So, it’s a truthful song. It came from a truthful place, and I’m still incredibly grateful for it.”

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