Keith Urban – Stupid Boy
You don’t always get to be, as David Copperfield intuited, the hero of your own life, and that can be especially true when going through a breakup. Sometimes, you’re the Joker, not Batman. In that spirit, I’m going to tell this part of the story now, because I’m sort of the bad guy here, and I would like it if you’re still on my side by the time we get to the end of this part of my musical story.
My wife and I often kid about my complete obliviousness to things that are obvious to her. (My catchphrase is that I am “a keen observer of the human condition”.) My observational skills are hit and miss: I pay attention to things in direct correlation to how much I give a crap about them. (So, yes, gentle reader, I am a man.) This isn’t a new development – and it seems to be getting worse as I age – I had just never had anyone in my life who could be bothered to point it out to me. I wonder now though whether my ex was, in her own less direct way, trying to tell me something similar. As our relationship was circling the drain, two things became clear to me. First, I wanted to save our marriage a whole lot more than she did. Second, and naturally relating to the first, she had come to believe that I was holding her back from becoming all that she wanted to be in life. I won’t get into all the history that led us to that point – that’s mostly her story to tell – but at its heart was that what I thought was encouragement to be the best version of herself was being received as browbeating, that my coaching was seen as more Woody Hayes or Bobby Knight rants than (insert your favourite coach here – I could find lots of examples of violent, racist and asshole sports figures, but no universal opinion on who the nicest ones were – let’s go with Andy Reid, since he at least looks like a Zeddy bear and had the restraint during the “Big Game” (this post is not NFL-approved) not to drop Travis Kelce onto his overhyped ass).
Not unexpectedly, I finally understood what was going on thanks to a song. I don’t for a fact know that her attachment to this song had any connection to me – I wasn’t the only stupid boy in her life by this point – but the way you experience music is always deeply personal, and in the context of everything that was going on at the time, it felt like “Stupid Boy” was a mirror. And I did not like what I was seeing.
From the first time I heard him speak, Keith Urban has felt like a bit of a gag to me. How did a guy from Australia become, of all things, a country music star? Well, like myself, he started out listening to country music because that’s what his parents listened to. Talent and hard work took him from there. It’s a niche stardom: after punching just his first name into Google, he was the sixth suggestion, after Moon (would be a solid #2 option), Emerson (I guessed he was the Emerson, Lake and Palmer guy, but this is too high), Haring (3rd seems about right), Richards (there’s our top guy) and Morrison (the power of being on television all the time, I guess). (Keith David was 7th. Not relevant – is any of this though? – I just like that he came up.) And I can’t honestly recall now if I had even heard of him before the fall of 2007. He was only on my radar because I was trying to save my marriage through the magical power of country music.
I listened to a fair bit of Urban over the next few years, and “Stupid Boy” is probably my favourite of his songs, followed by “You’ll Think of Me”. There are two versions, and I always preferred the six minutes plus take over the under four minutes radio release. It gives Urban a chance to really show off his guitar playing chops, which definitely felt anomalous in country music at the time: that his major influences when he started out were Mark Knopfler and Lindsey Buckingham may explain the rockier approach.
The song, co-written and originally sung by a woman, Sarah Buxton, is a pretty harsh indictment of its target. It’s the story of a girl who has a beautiful spirit and the potential to do great things, but finds herself trapped by a boy who is threatened by everything that makes her special. The guy is definitely a dick, and lines like “She never even knew she had a choice / And that’s what happens when the only voice she hears is telling her she can’t” and “I guess to build yourself up so high / You had to take her and break her down” don’t give him a lot of wiggle room to make a contrary case. No knock on its originator, but the switch in perspective gives the song more power – where Buxton is telling a story of liberation, of her escape from the stupid boy, in the male voice it becomes a tale of pain and failure, which, if we’re being honest, is a damned sight more country. He is coming to grips with every mistake he ever made, and that pathos elevates the song.
There is some naturalistic strumming to start, with nothing but guitar for almost a minute, turning mournful on the chorus. There are no drums until the second verse, when the entry of a firm, steady thump heightens the intensity of the song. The guitar run at 2:38 is chilling and an absolute rock star moment. It builds to the finale – “It took a while for her to figure out she could run / But when she did, she was long gone, long gone” – and her freedom at 3:45 is celebratory, and a natural end point to the song.
But Urban keeps going, and the last two and a half minutes become an existential howl against the fates that had broken him. As much as I love the first part of the song – and it’s really a damned near perfect pop single (genre be damned) – it’s the ending that kept gutting me again and again as I played it. Because when you are in the middle of a disaster, you can’t see the end. In the days of “Stupid Boy”, I worried about what would happen to my daughters, about being alone, about all my narcissistic tendencies that had brought me to that point (another ex had often said “George will do what George wants to do”, and this was so not a good thing), about being a fundamentally unhappy person incapable of experiencing joy because I had spent so much of my life avoiding pain. I was so desperate to preserve something that wasn’t working for anyone (except, perhaps, our children, though I knew from my own experience of being around two adults who no longer loved each other that that shit wore down everybody real fast), that I didn’t see it as a trap. She, at least, was able to see that, and acted. I reacted.
Now, I don’t think I’m THAT bad. But in my utter lack of awareness about what I had been doing, and maybe to no small degree out of her need to not be the bad guy for being the one who broke up our family, she repainted me as a villain who had prevented her from becoming all that she was meant to be. She needed me to be the stupid boy, because the alternative was accepting her own part in things going wrong. I won’t fault her for that – at the time, I was doing a fair bit of finger pointing myself.
In the end, none of this mattered. We were a poor match, and I could have been as solicitous and nurturing towards her as she thought she deserved and it wouldn’t have prevented either of us from being deeply and irresistibly dissatisfied with our lives together. By the end, even a stupid boy like me could figure that out. And, fortunately, I was a whole lot less stupid about such things the next time love found me – though maybe not any less oblivious. Right, honey?
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