ABC/Image Group LAWhen Keith Urban started writing “The Fighter,” his top-15 hit came together very quickly. The Australian superstar gives at least half of the credit to his Academy-Award-winning wife, Nicole Kidman.
“I literally just thought about Nic and I, and our relationship at the beginning and some of the things that we had said,” he remembers, “and it all went into that song.”
At the time, Keith was in London working on the album that would become Ripcord with producer busbee.
“It just came out incredibly quick, probably the fastest song that I’ve written in a long, long time…” Keith recalls. “I was actually driving to the studio to work on this other song that we’d started and I had most of the chorus in my head, and felt like I had most of the song in my head. I just had to flesh out the gist of the verses and everything.”
Once Keith made it to the studio, busbee quickly built a track. All the two lacked was the appropriate female vocalist.
“I think we put down the chorus pretty much straightaway with busbee filling in where the girl would sing,” Keith laughs. “I still have a copy of him going ‘What if I fall?’” Keith says as he breaks into song, imitating his producer’s falsetto.
“It’s fantastic,” he goes on. “That’s what I had as a place-holder for a long, long time, until I beautifully heard Carrie [Underwood]’s voice on it finally one day.”
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