Country star Keith Urban was barely a minute into introducing “We Go Back” when the room caught the joke that wasn’t entirely a joke. Playing Hard Rock Live at Etess Arena in Atlantic City, N.J., on August 21, 2026, the 58-year-old singer described the song as the story of two small-town kids who were the first of their friends to fall in love. “They had a good thing going, until the guy screwed it up,” he told the crowd. “I will do that.”
By the time the chorus came around, he was wiping tears off his cheeks.
Video from the concert caught the whole thing. The moment arrived months after a January 2026 ruling finalized his 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 that the song, or the emotion it drew out of him, had anything to do with his ex-wife.
A Breakup Ballad and a Tear
Urban released “Flow State” on June 12 — an album of yacht-rock covers whose lone original is “We Go Back,” out five months after a judge in Tennessee signed off on his divorce. The covers he has been playing live include “Steal Away,” “Summer Breeze” and “Baby Come Back.” Onstage he laid out the plot plainly: a couple raised on the same streets, the first in their circle to become an item, and one mistake that cost the man everything.
The night before, on August 20, he played the OLG Stage inside Fallsview Casino Resort in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where “We Go Back” and “You Look Good in My Shirt” came out with “more crunch than their studio versions,” according to a reviewer who attended. The following night, a Friday, at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, several years pass in the song before the two run into each other again, he went on. The man, struck by how little she has aged, falls back into easy conversation with her — until she brings up another man. The chorus he recounted runs on regret: a man conceding he was young and foolish, and that his chance is gone now that someone new is in the picture.
A few songs later, Urban crouched at the lip of the stage, brushed away a tear and grinned at the sold-out audience, which sent back cheers and applause. He picked his microphone back up and said nights like that one were why he keeps coming back to Atlantic City.
He turned up again soon after in an unlikelier setting. Urban made a surprise appearance at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, walking onto the field with a guitar during the sixth inning of a Savannah Bananas game against the Loco Beach Coconuts and playing “Long Hot Summer” while both teams ran through a choreographed dance routine behind him. It counted as one of the few public appearances he has made since the divorce.
The End of a 19-Year Marriage
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, both Hollywood and country music treated the couple as a rare fixed point. Sunday Rose, their daughter, arrived in 2008, followed by Faith Margaret in 2010; the girls are now 18 and 15. Kidman, 59, is also mother to Bella and Connor, whom she adopted during her marriage to actor Tom Cruise.
Irreconcilable differences after 19 years of marriage was the reason Kidman gave when she filed for divorce on September 30, 2025. The two were reported to have been living apart since early that summer, though the petition itself listed September 30 as the date of separation. Their settlement had both of them waiving rights to child and spousal support. Court documents also require the two to “behave wit[h]” one another in a manner the settlement spells out.
The filing landed four days after Urban changed a line of “The Fighter” — the song he has said was inspired by his relationship with Kidman — from “baby I’ll be the fighter” to “Maggie I’ll be your guitar player,” naming his 25-year-old touring guitarist, Maggie Baugh, who posted the video herself on September 26. It coincided with reports that he had started seeing a woman many years his junior in Nashville’s music circles. Singer Karley Scott Collins and Baugh herself have both been tied to him in reports since, though Collins called the claim “absolutely RIDICULOUS and untrue.” Baugh has not addressed it publicly; a friend of hers, the singer Alexandra Kay, said Baugh “has nothing to do with that whole relationship.”
Two months after the split became public, Urban appeared at the Country Music Awards in Nashville in November 2025, performing a duet with host Lainey Wilson and introducing singer Billy Ray Cyrus and actress Elizabeth Hurley for the night’s first category.
Whatever the strain between them, neither has thrown a public punch. Urban marked Kidman’s birthday on Instagram in June 2026, writing “happy birthday nicole mary,” all in lowercase, and closing with a long string of exclamation points.
The months around the split kept Kidman occupied. She carried out her duties as a Chanel ambassador, promoted her film and television work and brought her children along on trips abroad. On the marriage itself, she has said almost nothing. Speaking with Variety in March 2026, she said she was grateful for her family and meant to hold it together, adding that respect kept her from saying more.
She was more introspective in a British Vogue interview published August 13, describing a future she still cannot picture and 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. As for love, she said she was staying open to whatever arrives.
Something may already have arrived. On July 18, photographers caught Kidman poolside at a hotel in Portofino, Italy, with American businessman Michael Reinstein, the two of them 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.
Four days after the Atlantic City show, the two surfaced together again. Dolly Parton died on August 25, and Kidman marked it on Instagram with a photograph of herself, Parton, Urban and their daughters at the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame gala in 2023, captioned “We will always love you, Dolly.” Urban posted his own tribute the same day. That backdrop is what gave the August 21 Atlantic City set its particular weight. Urban, whose catalog includes “Somebody Like You” and “Making Memories of Us,” has built a career on songs about devotion. This time the subject was its collapse — and for a few seconds, in front of a full house, the distance between the character and the man singing him seemed to disappear.
