Keith Urban Channels Merle Haggard In Song

Keith Urban celebrated the number-one success of his song "Coming Home" in Nashville yesterday afternoon (10/23).

Keith shared songwriting credit on the song with a few other writers, including the late Merle Haggard. He said, "I wish I could have written with people like Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings. I thought if you take a sample from one of their records and took it into a writing session, it would be the same as that writer coming and going. I got this little riff and then used that as a spark to start writing a song. And I thought that that would be the same thing as that person being in the room and sparking an idea to write a whole brand new songs."

Urban even reached out to Haggard's wife and son. He continued, "Teresa, I've reached out to her like immediately that I had the idea to use 'Mama Tried' the riff, because I didn't just want to go in and rerecord it or I actually wanted to lift the intro from the actual recording. And so I really wanted to get her blessing for what I was doing with the song because it was taking a little bit of an artistic license with an iconic piece of music and manipulating it in a way that I hope she felt was still respectful to the original. But she loved the song, thankfully, and I reached out to Ben Haggard as well. And he also was very supportive."