Country star Keith Urban had spent less than a minute setting up the song when the room caught a joke that wasn’t quite a joke. Onstage on August 21, 2026, at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., the 58-year-old singer described “We Go Back” as the story of a small-town pair who fell for each other early, until the man wrecked it. Then he stopped, looked toward the wings and said he would handle that part himself. By the time the chorus came around, he was brushing tears off his cheeks.
The moment was captured on video from the concert. It arrived months after a January ruling finalized Urban’s divorce from actress Nicole Kidman — and only weeks after photographers twice caught Kidman in the company of an American businessman. At no point did Urban suggest the song, or the emotion it pulled out of him, had anything to do with his ex-wife.
A Breakup Ballad and a Tear
“Flow State,” the album Urban released in June — five months after a judge formally ended his marriage — includes “We Go Back.” From the stage, he laid out the plot plainly: two kids raised on the same streets, the first couple among their friends, and a single mistake that cost the man everything.
“They had a good thing going until the guy screwed it up,” he told the crowd.
Several years pass, Urban went on, and the two run into each other by chance. She looks barely changed, and the conversation comes easily — until she brings up another man. The chorus he described is built on regret: a man conceding he was young and foolish, and that his shot is gone now that someone else has it.
A few songs later, Urban crouched at the lip of the stage, wiped away a tear and smiled out at the sold-out audience, which sent back cheers and applause. He picked his microphone back up and told them nights like that were the reason he keeps returning to Atlantic City.
How a 19-Year Marriage Ended
They met at the G’Day USA gala in Los Angeles in January 2005 and married in Sydney in June 2006. For nearly 20 years, the marriage was regarded as a rare fixed point in both Hollywood and country music. Sunday Rose was born in 2008 and Faith Margaret in 2010; the girls are now 18 and 15. Kidman, 59, is also mother to Bella and Connor, adopted during her marriage to actor Tom Cruise.
Citing irreconcilable differences after 19 years of marriage, Kidman filed for divorce on September 30, 2025. The two had reportedly been living separately since the beginning of that summer. Both agreed as part of the settlement to waive rights to child and spousal support.
The filing landed days after Urban weathered a media firestorm over flirty footage involving Maggie Baugh, his 25-year-old touring guitarist, and amid reports that he had begun seeing a woman many years his junior in Nashville’s music circles. Since then, reports have linked him to singer Karley Scott Collins and to Baugh, though both women denied the rumors.
Whatever the strain has been, neither has taken a public swing at the other. In June, Urban marked Kidman’s birthday on Instagram, wishing Nicole Mary a happy birthday and closing with a long string of exclamation points.
Kidman filled the months around the breakup with work and family. She carried out her duties as a Chanel ambassador, promoted her film and television projects and brought her children along on trips abroad. On the marriage itself, she has said almost nothing. Talking with Variety in March, she said she was grateful for her family and intended to hold it together, and that respect kept her from going further.
She was more introspective in a British Vogue interview published August 13, describing a stretch of time marked by fear and exposure before she resolved to press ahead hopefully. “I had a different view of what my life was going to be, but this is what it is now,” she told British Vogue. She added: “You make all these plans, and you have all these ideas of what it’s all going to be like, and then it’s… not. You have to adjust. You adapt. The future, it’s completely unknown to me right now.” Of how she makes choices, she said: “I don’t overthink things, and I’m probably not that analytical. I’m far more feeling-centered, and I lead with my heart. I just go, ‘OK, what do I feel here? I’ll give it a go.’ It throws people, because I think they think I’ll be far more measured and I’m not.” On love, she said she was “moving on, embracing love, staying open, keeping the heart open and the possibilities.”
Something may already have arrived. On July 18, photographers caught Kidman at a hotel in Portofino, Italy, with private equity businessman Michael Reinstein, the two sipping Aperol Spritzes. Barely a fortnight later, on July 30, Reinstein collected her from Hollywood Burbank Airport in a black Ferrari. Neither has publicly confirmed a romantic relationship.
That backdrop is what gave the August 21 Atlantic City set its particular weight. A career’s worth of Urban songs — “Somebody Like You” and “Making Memories of Us” among them — has been about devotion. Here he was singing about devotion falling apart, and for a few seconds, in front of a full house, the distance between the character and the man singing him seemed to disappear.
