The country star said the rendition of his 2002 hit single served as a reminder to 'stay true to who you are.'
Everyone's favorite romcom featured a Keith Urban single that he's not all that proud of because, as he says, that rendition "was not that great." And it wasn't so great because, as he says, he "made a deal with the devil."
The country star appeared on SiriusXM's Highway Mornings when co-host Macie Banks brought up his 2002 single "Somebody Like You" being featured in the 2003 romcom How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. Banks opined that when she thinks of the film she thinks about Urban's hit track.
But when asked whether he thought it was "so cool" to have that song featured in the mega hit, Urban offered that the experience was "a great example of learning early on the price of" coming "pretty darn close" to "selling out" to Hollywood.
Urban explained that after he got asked to include the song as part of the film's soundtrack, studio execs came back to him with some rather puzzling notes.
"There was a, 'Oh, by the way, you sing it kind of country-ish.' And I’m like, 'I just sing the way I sing,'" Urban recalled in the candid conversation. "And they’re like, 'Yeah, we just wondered if you could re-do the vocal.' And I was like, 'Oh, OK. Well, it's a big film. OK. Let's do that.'"
But the experience left him even more befuddled.
"There must have been an army of people from Los Angeles on whatever the equivalent of Zoom was back then, but they put them into my headphones," Urban said. "I'm in the studio in Nashville. There’s all these executives from the film talking in my headphones while I’m at the microphone doing this vocal, almost coaching me how to sing this song."
Right there and then, in that exact moment, Urban says he made a startling realization.
"I’ve made a deal with the devil here. There’s no getting out of this," he continued. "And they’re like, 'Kinda sing it a bit more Bob Seger. Put a little more growl in the voice if you could.' And I'm just like, 'Oh, what am I doing?!' And we go through it. And I think the end result was not that great. But I was like, 'Rule number one, just stay true to who you are.'"
"Somebody Like You" was the first single off of Urban's third studio album, Golden Road.
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