Keith Urban always knew, if he wanted to make it big in country music, he had to go to Nashville.
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It's the lesson virtually every Australian musician learns; to make it big in the United States you have to spend a lot of time over there. It's such a huge place that heading over there for a month or two every year or so while being based in Australia just won't cut it.
Keiraville author Jeff Apter has followed Urban from his early days - he wrote an earlier biography called Favourite Son in 2009 - and has just totally revamped that for a new book simply titled Keith Urban.
What had always appealed to him the most about Urban's story was the singer-songwriter's unlikely success. As Apter says, heading over to Nashville was like trying to sell ice to the eskimos - it's not like Nashville had a shortage of country musicians.
Urban headed to Nashville in 1992, a year after he released his debut album in Australia. But the idea of moving there came to him long before that.
"Even as a kid he was hell bent on going to Nashville," Apter says.
"It always had to be Nashville. It wasn't Tamworth. It wasn't success in Australia. It was always Nashville. And for anyone outside that Nashville world, who's not American, to succeed in that market ... well, it hadn't happened before.
"Olivia Newton-John It had some country hits but she was really frowned upon and really rejected by the country mainstream because she wasn't a country artist as far as they were concerned. Which they proved to be correct because she's a pop artist.
"But she was the only Australian who had genuine chart success in Nashville before Keith."
While Urban was the first Australian to make it big in the US country scene, he had followed the path of musicians in other genres who realised to be a success over there, you actually have to be over there.
"If you look at people like Helen Reddy and Peter Allen, LRB, Rick Springfield - all those people who have had great success in America, they all relocated," he says.
"They've left Australia for good, set themselves up in America and really pursued that pot of gold that is American success and did it on the ground."
While working for Rolling Stone, Apter followed Urban's career from the late 1990s when he had started making some headway. He saw first-hand just how different Urban's approach to cracking the US was compared to other Australian country performers.
"The first time I met Keith very briefly was in Nashville in about '98," he says.
"I was living there and I'd caught up with a bunch of Australian country artists, including Troy Cassar-Daley and Gina Jeffreys, who were doing this very small showcase in Nashville as part of a much bigger week-long event.
"For me it just seemed it was a junket. There was no way they were going to crack the American market by doing a show on a Tuesday afternoon at a race course in Nashville. It just wasn't going to happen. Keith was doing it differently. He was setting himself up there playing five, six, seven nights a week."
As Apter acknowledges, the decision to base himself in the United States wasn't a hard decision at the time. He didn't have any record in the charts and wasn't an established act along the lines of a Slim Dusty or even a James Blundell.
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Though, in the long run, it meant he was bigger in the United States than in Australia.
"It's only in the last seven or eight years that he's managed to become a bankable act in Australia as well as America," Apter says.
"In fact the only top 10 hit he's ever had here was that song he did with Pink called One Too Many that came out in 2020.
"He hasn't had a genuine charting single in Australia - I found that really weird because he can now come and play whatever Homebush stadium is called now.
"He can fill that now but it's taken a long time - but he's been playing venues of that size in America since about 2005."
These days, his profile in Australia is big enough (perhaps helped in part by his marriage to Nicole Kidman in 2006) for him to be signed up as a judge on singing competition The Voice.
The TV talent show is a concept Urban knows well, having performed on several in his early years. In 1983 he appeared as a 16-year-old on New Faces, where he performed Air Supply's All Out of Love.
In an earlier appearance on Pot of Gold as a nine-year-old covering Dolly Parton's Applejack, judge Bernard King - whose role was to be the villain - tore him to shreds. It's a memory that Urban never seemed to get over and which perhaps influenced his approach on The Voice
"I think he gave him five out of 25," Apter says.
"I've got a feeling that's stuck with him because he's referred to it quite a few times subsequently. So I reckon when he was offered those roles with American ldol and The Voice he probably saw a way to correct the balance and prove that not everyone is Bernard King or his more recent version, Simon Cowell."
For this new biography, Apter chose not to simply update 2009's Favourite Son but completely "pulled it apart".
"That original book, I think the timing was off because he wasn't the public figure that he is now," Apter says.
"I originally had the idea to update it but I ended up going to town and pulled it apart. I wasn't really happy with the original one.
"It's a really fortunate thing for a writer to be able to revisit former work, particularly when you weren't really happy with it. This is a fuller and I think more detailed and more accurate portrait of the guy."
While he had a bit of a back and forth conversation with Urban's team while writing the new bio, Apter didn't get to interview him - or Kidman - for it. But he had interviewed Urban a number of times over the years as well as catching quite a few of his shows in venues small and large.
"That provided a lot of insight into the guy's character," he says.
"A lot of what you see on stage is the real deal. He's very personable, he's a crowd pleaser. And I think he just loves what he does."
Keith Urban by Jeff Apter is out now.
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Glen Humphries
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
