00:00Hey Billboard, it's Keith Urban here. These are five things you didn't know about my new song, Straight Line.
00:15This song was originally recorded with just drum machine and no real drums.
00:20And we finished out the whole song and for whatever reason we just felt like it was linear and not going anywhere.
00:27And so we decided to put real drums on it and when we did, it changed the whole thing in a big way.
00:32So shout out to all the real drums out there.
00:34When we started writing the song, it was very streamer conscious.
00:37We had a groove and we kept singing, late night lover, late night lover.
00:43And when one of the other writers was singing it, I thought he was saying straight line lover.
00:47And I thought that was more interesting and then we were wondering what straight line lover meant.
00:51And so we just trimmed it down to straight line lover.
00:58I wrote this song with my bass player, Jerry Flowers, a guy called Chase McGill,
01:04and a great producer, songwriter called Greg Wells, great musician.
01:08Four of us had never written together.
01:10We had two days to write and the very first day we wrote a song and the very second day we wrote Straight Line.
01:17And both of the songs we wrote will be on this album.
01:20So my bass player, Jerry Flowers, is the guy playing, it sounds like a mandolin riff that opens the song.
01:26It's a mini 12 string guitar, it's tiny, and he played that riff on that.
01:30He'd never played that instrument before, but he played it on that day like that and it sparked the whole song.
01:34The song was originally recorded in Nashville and I did a vocal in Nashville, but I wasn't happy with it.
01:39Went back to California where Greg Wells has a studio, did another vocal out there, did some backing vocals out there.
01:45Came back to Nashville, wasn't happy with that, did another vocal.
01:48And then about a week later, wasn't happy with that, did another vocal.
01:51We did about five passes on the lead vocal on this song to make it sound like we just banged it out.
Comments