Songfacts®:

• This mid-tempo ballad finds Urban offering his shoulder to cry on to a hurting girl. He is giving her a safe place to release herself and break apart. It is unclear whether Urban is just being a good friend, or maybe he is motivated by a romantic possibility.
• The song was written by Ross Copperman and Jon Nite, who previously teamed up to pen Luke Bryan's "Strip It Down." Jon Nite recalled to The Boot the writing of the song:
  
  "I think we were supposed to write with Dierks Bentley that day — someone cancelled on us. I had, for several months, been playing this little melody that eventually became the chorus melody. I came over to Ross's studio.
  
  This one was quite a long write; it was hours and hours of just talking through life. My daughter had just gone to college, so I was kind of freaked out about that. She's in her dorm, which she hates, and she's been wanting to come home, and I was like, 'No, you can't come home.' Ross was talking to me about friends of his that had trouble with having babies and all this kind of stuff. We didn't have anything until probably two hours later, and I had a hook from years and years back that I just said, 'This kind of feels like what we're talking about,' and then he did all his magic stuff."
  
• Keith Urban said he can relate to the song in two different ways. "'Break On Me' is just one of those songs that I, the first time I heard it, it hit me in all the right ways, because having been in that place where I've needed someone to 'break on,' but also of course being someone who could be strong for somebody else," he explained. "I'd gotten the song and not long after that was when [my wife] Nic lost her dad, and I found myself living out that song."