RAMBLE ON: "The Fighter" by Keith Urban ft. Carrie Underwood

Twenty-three years and some weeks ago, roughly around Valentine’s Day 2001, Nicole Kidman danced her way out of Scientology’s clutches, bouncing out of her lawyer’s offices in triumph after signing the final divorce papers with Tom Cruise. Five years later, she remarried, to a fellow Aussie, country singer Keith Urban. Keith and Nicole aren’t as high-profile as Nicole’s last marriage – it’s very hard for anyone in country music to reach Tom Cruise’s level of fame – and, working in two entirely different spheres of showbiz, it’d be hard for them to connect their two careers the way Tom and Nicole did. But they’re certainly a very visible couple – at every single awards show, be it in Nashville or Hollywood, there they are on each other’s arms (and it always jarring because they make no sense to be there until you remember who they’re married to). It's been nearly twenty years since they met and they’ve been one of the most steadfastly, even boringly happy couples in celebritydom.

I don’t have a lot of strong feelings or attachments to Keith Urban, whose long career happened during a time when I was mostly not listening to country music so I can’t say I’m very familiar with his oeuvre. I associate him mostly with two songs. One of them is “You’ll Think of Me,” a breakup ballad that got a tiny amount of pop crossover and which I can only describe as “simpering.” The other is “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16,” an absolute all-timer in literally-just-a-list-of-things country music (Nashville’s most disreputable subgenre). He reads as a Hollywood pretty boy, with his earrings and boyband blond streaks in his hair, his pretty tenor with a minor twang that doesn’t really seem natural.

So I’m not particularly interested in him as a person or an artist, but I do like celebrity gossip, and something about “The Fighter,” a single from 2017, catches my notice. Allegedly it was inspired by, of all things, “Marvin Gaye” by Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor, the worst song ever written; Keith says it made him want to do a male-female duet, and I hope that was literally the only inspiration he got from it. Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like that. It’s… fine. Lyrically, it’s not super-interesting. But the title line makes my ears perk up: “(And if I get scared?) / I’ll hold you tighter / When they’re trying to get to you, baby, I’ll be the fighter.”

I’m sorry, but who the hell is “they”? Urban says the song is about their early courtship, and how Keith won Nicole’s heart after her painful breakup. Sure, the song is about love, not the past, and winning the heart of a divorcee is a difficult and rewarding endeavor and the kind of thing you write a song about. Nicole tries to speak about Tom as little as possible these days and I’m not sure Keith has even mentioned Tom in public ever. But the song begins “I know he hurt you,” “he didn’t deserve you” – whether intended or not, that’s a straight shot at Tom Cruise. And Urban singing that he’ll fight off anyone who tries to get to her? Knowing what I know about Scientology, and the extremely weird circumstances of Tom’s divorce to Nicole and then to Katie Holmes, it does make me wonder. What exactly was Nicole scared of, who was coming after her, sixteen years after her divorce, that made him write that?

This is probably not the first thing anyone notices about “The Fighter” – the first thing anyone notices is that it’s not a country song. I almost wouldn’t call it selling out because that implies that he’s watered down his sound; instead, it’s so radically different from his sound. But, country music eventually picks up all the discarded sounds of yesteryear, and Urban has never been the most authentic of country singers, so who better than him to pick up the gated drums and synths of ‘80s pop, right?

Actually, there are lots of people better than Urban to do this, we’ve lived through two decades of ‘80s nostalgia and it’s really not a neglected sound in music. And yet, Keith Urban does add something to this sound, something I have difficulty defining, something that’s definitely not there in the throwback works of Dua Lipa or The Weeknd. Certainly, he throws himself into it, playing his guitar in his short-sleeve tee and his duet partner Carrie Underwood (never cuter) in a Flashdance torn sweatshirt. I can’t really think of a song that sounds like this, not from today nor really from the ‘80s – “The Fighter” literally uses the same chord structure as “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and makes the same promises in the lyrics, but I wouldn’t mistake one for the other.

I think what Keith Urban adds to the equation, the thing that The Weeknd or Dua Lipa do not, is his country-star earnestness. There used to be a place for guys like that in mainstream pop, pretty po-faced white guys whose blandness only underscored their sincerity. Keith Urban wound up a country singer because that’s the only place that would accept a guy like him but in another time he could have been a Corey Hart, a John Waite, a Rick Springfield. Something about the way he carries himself and strums his guitar in this video makes me think he’s been trying to be Bryan Adams his entire career; on this track, far more pop than anything Adams ever attempted, Keith outdoes him.

What synthesizers do for Keith Urban is clarifying, but what they do for Carrie Underwood is revelatory. Despite coming right out of the gate with two or three massive crossover hits, Carrie Underwood has resolutely stayed in her lane, never once attempting to escape the safe confines of Nashville (and becoming one of the vanishingly few female singers to have sustained success doing so). That might be to protect herself from the vagaries of the vindictive country industry, or it might just be lack of interest, but “The Fighter” shows that she very easily could have been a dance diva. Carrie’s oeuvre tends toward the rock-ier end of country, stuff that lets her belt full-force (and indeed she already had an ‘80s power ballad in her catalog, Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home”, not to mention the many she sang on “Idol”) and the sweaty synth-and-guitar ‘80s could have been good for her too. But it feels like she doesn’t have enough songs in her catalog that actually tap into her essential wholesomeness. In “The Fighter,” she sounds loose and like she’s actually having fun, and in the video she is adorable, bouncing around and dancing in a way that I am just not accustomed to seeing her. The video is barebones (maybe evoking the cheapo videos they used to make for these kinds of songs) but it allows the chemistry between Keith and Carrie to shine. They look like two people who actually enjoy each other’s company.

Despite its blatant attempt at crossing over, “The Fighter” did mid numbers both on country and adult contemporary. I never once heard “The Fighter” on the radio, but I was living in New York City, a place that’s allergic to country music (and to decent radio stations, for that matter). Keith, though never the most authentic of singers, has always kept one leg in country music ever since (he did make a guest appearance on a Rita Ora song this year which I don’t recommend listening to). I don’t think this is a huge loss, since “The Fighter” falls pretty short of greatness; Urban says he wrote it quickly, and it shows. (The first verse in particular is so half-assed that calling it a first draft seems too generous, it’s more like an adlib. “Your precious heart is a precious heart”? Come on, Urban. Try harder.)

Still, there’s something about the song’s cuteness that lights it up. Urban has a little video with his wife on his YouTube page where they turn the song on and sing along. “Oh my god I love this song!” Nicole squeals with mock surprise, it’s a joke but I think she does probably genuinely love this song. Like, I get that the staging of the video is intentional, to make them seem like a relatable married couple in love and not a platinum-selling artist singing to his movie star wife, but it works on me. I hope he’s been fighting off Scientology goons for her all this time.