Keith Urban made his way to the Genius office to dive into his new single “CHUCK TAYLORS.” Produced by Greg Wells and the GRAMMY-winning country star himself, the song is part of his latest album, 'HIGH.' On today’s episode of VERIFIED, Keith breaks down the metaphor behind Chuck Taylors, explores the song’s melody, unpacks the vivid imagery he paints with his lyrics and more!
Category
🎵
MusicTranscript
00:00It's likening that throwing a pair of Chuck Taylors up over the power line
00:05and those two shoes being like the couple and after all these years they're still hanging in
00:09there like Chuck Taylors on a power line. It was just such a good rural street everywhere
00:13metaphor that I felt it was so relatable. And I've seen plenty of those scenes,
00:18even in Australia. People throw shoes over the power lines in Australia, you know.
00:22I was driving to the studio to write with a couple of guys. I love writing with Chase
00:33McGill, Jerry Flowers and Greg Wells. And in my head I just heard this flailing bass note and
00:38the... So I had this whole melody formed, but zero idea what the song was about. And Chase
00:52McGill had this lyric for this song called Chuck Taylors and he had no melody. I said,
00:58let me see if that works on this and the two just did that. It was crazy.
01:09It's got a beautiful, very rural setting already. Just the opening line of we were holding hands,
01:20barefoot in the grass for me sets up an innocence. There's a timelessness about it. It's not really
01:25of a time. It's not really of a place. It's just an innocence. Chase is very poetic. He's got a
01:29great way of painting a feeling in his lyrics.
01:38There's something larger than the little town that the couple is in, starting with the sky
01:49looking like an ocean. It's just infinite. Obviously this town's nowhere near the ocean.
01:53It's probably on a lake, but the sky look like an ocean and the water look like glass.
01:57And forever meant tomorrow, which is what it feels like. I mean, I remember that feeling
02:01very vividly. Like, God, if we can last till tomorrow, that's like forever.
02:05It's one of the only quick, fastest ways to explain the intensity of how I feel about
02:09something is to go, this is forever. It's forever, man. We're going to last forever.
02:14That's how intense it is. I know that feeling so well.
02:17The rhythm was so imperative for setting up the energy that could launch us into the chorus.
02:38The section also has a tension to it, because that's what's happening in the conversation.
02:44The chords go from a four chord to a minor, so the minor has tension. So there's release and
02:50possibility, and then there's tension. And then it launches into the chorus,
02:53which is what they're doing with the shoes. We're launching them up.
02:56I believe Chase said,
03:10my size 12 and your size 7, we threw them straight up to heaven. I think that's all he had.
03:15There wasn't a high. The melody I had was...
03:19So I needed an open vowel. Heaven wasn't as good as high, so it's a better vowel.
03:25That's where you get songwriter craft coming into something,
03:29where it's got to be singable, but also make sense.
03:49The metaphor of the Chuck Taylors representing the couple was just beautiful and so relatable,
03:54and I hadn't heard that before. I remember every time I used to see those hanging up on a power
03:58line, I'd be like, I was thinking about somebody walking away with bare feet, maybe regretting that.
04:25I loved writing with Chase because he does come with a realism in a way that felt very fresh to
04:31me. When he said, in between the silence, you and me talked all night, when he first said it to me,
04:35I was like, what do you mean? If you talked all night, there wouldn't be any silence. And he's
04:39like, well, nobody talks all night. If you have a conversation with someone for hours and hours
04:44and hours and hours and hours, there's always these periods of just nothing being said.
04:47And that nothing being said was the thing that this couple didn't want to deal with,
04:53which was her having to leave.
05:08My first thought was that the car was bright red, like the flowers on her dress, but it's actually
05:14part of the next line. Bright as the red on your flower dress pattern, a light went off.
05:19I've got an idea of how to express my utter devotion to you. We're going to throw these
05:25sneakers up over the power line and hope that that represents us.
05:28I love that we name checked a satin because it's such an obscure model, mate. What
05:36hell is a satin? And there's a Southern thing about it, which I really love too. When I moved
05:42to Nashville, I saw satins everywhere and now I don't see them anywhere. I don't know what
05:45happened to them. They all just disappeared. It's like sitting right there on the hood of
05:48your Chevy. I've heard that a million times and it wouldn't have registered to me. I wouldn't
05:54have seen a car. It would have just flown by as like 101 car choice. But to be sitting right
06:00there on the hood of your satin, I'm like, oh, I'm back in. I'm in the song.
06:04The very ending of Chuck Taylor's has a recurring background part that says,
06:15we're going to make it. Yes, we're going to make it now. Going to make it. Yes,
06:18we're going to make it now. Going to make it. Yes, we're going to make it now. Going to make
06:21it now. Going to make it out. It doesn't say now. The last time is just going to make it out.
06:26It sounds like now every time, but there's intent for the very last word being we're
06:32going to make it out. I really liked that deceptive little moment at the very end of the song.