Keith Urban is one of the most-loved country and western singers around. True, apart from Keith Urban we only know Willie Nelson, the man who defrauded Bridget Jones and Whistlin' Vern Nippletoe, but love's love OK?
And Keith Urban knows all about emotional pain; without such access to this pain he'd have never written songs like Don't Shut Me Out and Darn It! That Piggy's Playin' The Banjo (In The Back Of My Goshdarn Truck). However, emotional pain isn't called emotional pain because it allows you to write bland, painfully sincere, MOR country and western tunes – it's called emotional pain because it hurts. Keith Urban is such an expert on pain that he's currently in rehab for a drinking problem, and he has been speaking about what to do if you have problems like him. And when we say 'speaking out' we mean 'stretching a metaphor about water so far that it borders on insane.'
When Nicole Kidman looks at Keith Urban, she sees the man that Tom Cruise couldn't be. Which is strange, because when we see Keith Urban we see a boring country singer that looks as if he spends a bit too long on the old hair straighteners. But that's beside the point – because he's married to a Hollywood superstar, we have to treat everything Keith Urban says as if it came from the mouth of a superstar, too. It doesn't, obviously, but that's how we're going to treat it.
You may not have known about Keith Urban before he met Nicole Kidman, but ever since Keith and Nicole got engaged then decided to fly to Australia and rent all the helicopters they could find so that nobody could see them getting married, they've been a proper celebrity couple. In fact Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban are literally so famous that quite often people look at them. But it's not all rose-tinted people-looky fame for Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman – under the smiles, Keith Urban's alcoholism was about to raise its ugly head, and it was enough to send Keith Urban to rehab a few weeks ago. The problem must've been serious too, because it meant that Keith Urban had to miss the CMA awards, where he was due to win all kinds of prizes whittled from driftwood by a blind boy with webbed fingers.
A few weeks before he went to rehab, Keith Urban had an interview with men's magazine Best Life where he started dishing out all the advice to anyone with an addiction problem. To these "souls at sea," Keith Urban launched into a complicated advisory metaphor about drowning:
"Start communicating with the people around you. Everyone gets overwhelmed at points, but it's when you think you can handle it yourself and you don't reach out for help. That's when the end is near. Recognise that you are about the tire, that drowning is looming. I've definitely been that drowning guy, and in the midst of drowning, I thought, 'I wonder if I should put my hand up?' … I'm just really grateful to be present and doing what I can. And if it overwhelms me, I speak out and say, 'There is too much going on."'
Keith Urban's right – we do have an addiction problem. And thanks to Keith Urban's advice we're not going to drown. We're not. In fact, we're not going anywhere near the sea. And if we see a puddle in the road, we're just going to walk right on past it without plunging our faces into it and trying to breathe it in. And we're not even going to wash our faces, either, in case any of that facewash water goes down into our lungs. And we're not going to drink any form of liquid, either, lest that liquid accidentally goes down the wrong way and drowns us.
That is what Keith Urban was talking about, right?
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