Keith Urban’s latest single, “Wild Hearts,” tells the story of his own wild heart, which started beating furiously at age five when his dad took him, his brother and mother to a Johnny Cash concert. However, Keith almost didn’t record the song until he woke up one day singing the chorus a week after he turned down the song. He just didn’t connect to the verses, so he called up the writers – Brad Tursi of Old Dominion, Jennifer Wayne of Runaway June and Eric Paslay – and asked if he could rewrite the verses to reflect his own journey, to which they agreed wholeheartedly.

“I sat down and thought about my journey and when did that begin and the very first thing that popped into my head was probably when my dad took our family to see Johnny Cash. I was five, and that’s an impactful concert to see at any point in your life but when you’re five it really – it was something else. And the things I remembered mostly about it were, of course, this guy up on stage. I remember this white-hot spotlight coming all the way from the back of the room. It was huge and I remember the screaming of this crowd. And then I remember looking up at my dad and seeing the way that he looked at this person on stage, and probably subconsciously I probably thought I’ve never seen my dad look at me like that. And so that probably was the beginning of my journey. So, I literally wrote down ‘saw the man in black/spotlight in the air/heard a thousand screams/saw my daddy stare/I feel like I’ve been running since the day that I was born/Eagle on my back/phoenix on my arm.’”

Keith just finished up his dates on his Vegas residency. He’ll head Down Under for a tour of Australia beginning December 1st in New Castle.