Without You

Album: Get Closer (2010)
Charted: 52
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a track from Australian country artist Keith Urban's seventh studio album, Get Closer. A theme that loosely runs through the record is Urban's connection to his wife, actress Nicole Kidman, to whom he's been married since June 25, 2006.
  • Urban reflects in this song on the importance of his relationship with Kidman, having for a long time previously been consumed by his job. Despite its personal nature, the song was penned by two outside writers Dave Pahanish and Joe West, who also authored Toby Keith's "American Ride" and Jimmy Wayne's "Do You Believe Me Now" Producer Dann Huff told Billboard magazine the song is "the most autobiographical thing that he's never written."
  • Urban told The Boot how he came across this song: "A friend of mine happened upon this song somewhere and called me up and said, "You've got to hear this song, you would swear that you wrote it." And sure enough, it was uncanny how much it was suited to my life. I think if I'd written something like this, I would have felt it was too literal, not poetically disguised enough. Maybe it's because I didn't write it that I was able to hear how authentic and truthful it is."
  • Pahanish told The Boot about Blue Sky singer Emily West's contribution towards getting this song cut: "I put an early version of the demo on my album as kind of an extra before it was actually finished," he recalled. "Emily had a copy and gave it to Keith at a party they were at and told him this tune was his life. Keith called me personally the next morning and said he wanted to record it for his album. He put some finishing touches on it lyrically, recorded it, and now it really is climbing with a bullet."
  • The song is not to be confused with "Without You," a track Urban recorded on his self-titled debut album in 1991.

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