Keith Urban Recalls ‘Man In Black’ Moment When He Was Five

Keith Urban's new song "Wild Hearts" directly addresses Keith's first concert of seeing Johnny Cash in concert when he was just five years old.

Keith sings, “Saw the man in black/ Spotlight in the air/ Heard a thousand screams/ Saw my dad’s stare.”

Urban told us of writing the song, “I sat down and thought about my journey, and when did that begin? And the very first thing that popped in my head was probably when my dad took our family to see Johnny Cash.”

He continued, “I was five, and that’s an impactful concert to see at any point in your life. But when you’re five, it was something else. The things I remembered most about it were, of course, this guy up on stage. I remember this white-hot spotlight coming all the way from the back of the room. It was huge. I remember the screaming of this crowd.”

And then a young Keith looked at his father, he recalled, “And then I remember seeing the way that he looked at this person on stage. And probably subconsciously, I probably thought, ‘I’ve never seen my dad look at me like that.’ And so that probably was the beginning of my journey.”