Musician Keith Urban is the star of the brand-new CBS show The Road, which premiered this Sunday. The TV series follows twelve young musicians as they compete for the chance to perform as the opening act on the famous country musician’s tour—a real springboard for these career-minded amateurs.
In the show’s first episode, the ex-husband of Nicole Kidman performed a track from his latest album, High, released in 2024, which some saw as an allusion to his relationship with the Oscar-winning actress. Performing “Straight Line,” the first track on the album, he sang: “I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want to go around in circles. It destroys us.” The show’s premiere came less than a month after the official announcement of their divorce last September.
In a February 2024 Instagram, Urban explained the meaning behind the song’s lyrics. “‘Straight Line’ is wanting to break out of a soul-sucking routine that you might be stuck in,” he wrote, adding that “it’s a message of feeling alive again and getting out from under that dark cloud. “Maybe in a relationship, a job, with creativity, with yourself…whatever it is.”
After nineteen years of marriage and two daughters, Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 14, the two stars made their separation official in September 2025. They met in 2005 at the G’Day USA Gala, an event celebrating Australians who have made a career in the US. For years, the public side of their relationship seemed strong, so their separation came as a surprise to fans. But the two maintained different lifestyles—while one was on tour, the other was on location, meaning they didn’t have much time together.
During an interview included in the first episode of The Road, Urban said that life on the road can be hard on a performer. “When you wake up on a tour bus at 3:30 in the morning and you’re sick as a dog, you’re in the middle of nowhere and you’ve got to play your fifth show later that night, and you haven’t slept, and you miss your friends, and you’re missing your family, and you’re completely lonely and miserable and sick—and you say to yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’” he said. “The only answer can be: because this is what I’m born to do.”
A source close to the couple told the Daily Mail that their relationship had been suffering even before their separation. “They loved each other very much and they may not divorce, but they both live in a world where neither of them is present,” the insider said. “Keith and Nicole have been together for decades and there is a world they can reconcile with, but in the way they are behaving now, they are not a couple.”
Originally published in Vanity Fair France.
