NEED TO KNOW
Nicole Kidman spent 19 years as Keith Urban’s muse.
A little over a year after meeting at a Los Angeles gala in 2005, the former couple married in Australia, where they both grew up. The Emmy-winning actress and Grammy-winning country singer welcomed two daughters, Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret, in 2008 and 2010, respectively.
Throughout their nearly two decades of marriage, Urban confirmed that at least five of his songs were inspired and written for Kidman. However, he told Rob Lowe during a September 2024 appearance on his podcast Literally! With Rob Lowe that a lot of his songs are “observational.”
“People think that everything I write is about [Kidman] and of course, you know, a lot of things are and a lot of things aren’t,” he said. “I recorded a song called ‘Brown Eyes Baby’ and I had X amount of people going, ‘Well that, you can’t sing, you can’t sing a song about a brown-eyed girl, I mean, she’s got blue eyes. She must have been so angry.’ ”
Urban continued, “And I’m like, ‘Well, no not really, it’s just a song. It’s just a song.’ ”
Following news that Kidman had filed for divorce in September 2025, a clip of the singer’s performance of his song “The Fighter” — which he famously wrote about the actress in 2016 — surfaced. In it, Urban can be heard changing the lyrics to include the name of his utility player, Maggie Baugh.
Urban often ad-libs comments when performing the song live. For example, while singing “The Fighter” with Underwood at the 2017 CMT Music Awards, Urban interjected, “Carrie Underwood, I’m gonna be your fighter!”
So, what other songs did Keith Urban write about Nicole Kidman? Here are all the tracks the country star has confirmed are about his estranged wife.
“Once in a Lifetime”
During a June 2014 concert in Melbourne, Australia, Urban told the sold-out crowd that he had written the 2006 track “Once in a Lifetime” (from Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing) about Kidman while they were engaged.
“A couple of months before our wedding we were in our hotel and we were talking about the future,” the singer said on stage, per UPI. “Nic was getting very nervous about the thought of marrying me. She was saying things like ‘it’s a long shot’ … I knew she loved me, but I knew she was scared.”
He added that he wrote the song as a way to “reassure her.”
“Got It Right This Time (The Celebration)”
The same year Urban married Kidman, he also wrote and released the song “Got It Right This Time (The Celebration)” from the album Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing. He told The Boot in January 2015 that though he had “full conviction” when he wrote it, the hook “I think I got it right this time” sounded better than “I know.”
“But as the song has evolved and grown, our marriage has evolved a lot,” he explained, noting that the most recent recording included an ad-libbed line that said “I mean, I know I do.”
“Songs are interesting, because they’re written at a certain time in a writer’s life, and they mean a certain thing, but often, the really magical ones develop deeper meaning,” Urban continued. “And this song has definitely grown to have a deeper meaning for me.”
“Thank You”
Urban penned his gratitude for Kidman in the 2009 song “Thank You” off his album Defying Gravity. He said that he wanted to record the track “quickly” so he could capture the emotion in its “real form.”
“But it’s something I wanted to be able to do for my wife, too,” the country singer told The Boot in November 2009. “She’s been an incredible strength for me … in the last couple of years, particularly so.”
“The Fighter”
In 2016, Urban released his chart-topping duet with Carrie Underwood, “The Fighter,” telling Billboard the following year that the song was inspired by a conversation he had with Kidman before they were married.
“When things get tough, I need to hold her tighter and just try to take care of her,” Urban explained. “The song is about wanting to heal somebody, wanting to take care of somebody, wanting to protect somebody. It’s really like a vow in so many ways.”
He added, “I want that tenderness to not have to get hardened to the world. That’s my job as her husband, to put myself around her so she can remain that way. And that’s really the chorus of ‘The Fighter.’ ”
Just days before news of their split broke in 2025, Urban was recorded performing a slightly different version of the song. He changed the lyric from “When they’re trying to get to you baby I’ll be the fighter” to “When they’re tryna get to you, Maggie I’ll be your guitar player,” referring to Baugh.
A clip of the performance was shared on Instagram by Baugh, who captioned the video “Did he just say that👀.”
“Gemini”
The last song Urban confirmed was about Kidman was the track “Gemini,” off his 2018 album Graffiti U. He told iNews in March 2019 that the track — which includes the lyric “She’s a maniac in the bed/But a brainiac in her head” — was about his then-wife and that she “loves it.”
“It’s a fun song,” Urban told the outlet, per E! Online. “My co-writer Julia Michaels asked me to describe Nicole and that’s what came out. ‘She is Gemini, but she’s not a contradiction. She can roll with things.’ “
