Keith Urban knows the foundation of a singer-songwriter’s legacy is built upon songs. “The song is the beginning of everything,” Urban tells American Songwriter backstage at the 2023 Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony. “Any of us that sing or involved in music in any way started with a song. You’d have no career without great songs.”
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Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Urban’s identity as a songwriter was born out of his love for writing poetry as a child. “I was already playing guitar, so I thought, ‘I’ll see if I can make some of this poetry fit in chords, see if I can sing it,'” he explains. “That was really how it started.” He wrote his first song with his brother when he was in the third grade and his brother was in fifth. Titled “Good Old Country Music,” Urban admits the song was “terrible.”
“I think Ed Sheeran was asked once, ‘How do you write a great song?’ He goes, ‘Just start with all the bad ones because they’re all going to be bad, and work your way towards it,'” Urban recites. The country superstar says it took time to develop his identity as a songwriter and believes it wasn’t until his early 20s that he started writing good songs, “When I really felt like I was starting to write something that was structured right,” he observes.
The “Somebody Like You” hitmaker admits that he fell into the habit of comparing himself to other artists and songwriters like Garth Brooks and Steve Wariner. “I would always compare it to everybody else’s songs,” he shares, adding that after Brooks’ blockbuster album No Fences was released in 1990 he thought, “Compared to that I have a lot work to do. It was always trying to step it up, and I think that’s why I wanted to come to Nashville because if you want to write songs, you gotta come to Nashville. At some point, you gotta be around the best songwriters there are, and they’re here.”
Urban was recently inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame’s 2023 class alongside Kix Brooks, David Lee Murphy, Casey Beathard, and Rafe Van Hoy.
Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images
