Keith Urban and Blake Shelton have hit The Road together to host a new singing competition produced by Taylor Sheridan. Just weeks before the series premiered this month on the 2025 TV schedule, however, news broke that Urban’s 19-year marriage to Nicole Kidman was ending. Knowing that the show was filmed in those final months might give some context to some of “The Fighter” singer’s comments — and it certainly made his and Shelton’s jokes about pickup lines interesting.
In Episode 2 of The Road, which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription, the musicians visited Dallas, Texas, for two nights in front of a live audience. One contestant, Jenny Tolman, took the stage asking who was there with someone they loved and proceeded to ask them to put their arms around each other. Urban and Shelton dutifully gave each other a big hug before Urban followed the singer’s instructions by telling Shelton:
I am going to love you until my tank is empty.
While The Road hosts were all smiles during the interaction, it’s hard not to be a little sad at the thought that Keith Urban's tank with Nicole Kidman had run out of gas after 20 years. At least he got a good hug out of it.
Another moment later in the show also unwittingly referenced Urban’s soon-to-be-single-again life. The former coach of The Voice and the former American Idol judge had this exchange:
- Blake Shelton: You think it’s a good pickup line? ‘Hey, cowboy, what’s your name?’
- Keith Urban: Well, not from you.
They got a good laugh out of that one, but the reality is that Keith Urban’s now in a place to judge just how effective that line can be.
We’re only two episodes into the CBS competition, and these are not the only instances that raised eyebrows amongst fans amid the four-time Grammy winner’s divorce. In the season premiere, Urban warned the artists of the difficulty of life on the road, saying:
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?’ The only answer can be: because this is what I’m born to do.
He then took the stage in Fort Worth, Texas, to sing “Straight Line,” a song about escaping a “soul-sucking” life that he apparently wrote about a year before his split from Nicole Kidman, leaving us to wonder what the “dark cloud” was that his song’s narrator was trying to get out from under.
A lot of country music deals with heartbreak and vulnerability, and as Keith Urban proves he’s a force to be reckoned with as a mentor for the budding artists on The Road, I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped other pearls of wisdom and emotion that signals other things going on in his personal life.
Tune in to see what he and Blake Shelton get into next, with new episodes airing at 9 p.m. ET Sundays on CBS and streaming the next day on Paramount+.
