Keith Urban Celebrates 19 Years Sober After Wife’s Life-Changing Intervention

Keith Urban will celebrate 19 years of sobriety in 2025. Urban recently discussed his long battle with addiction and the powerful intervention after his life to help him through recovery.

"Through the years of drinking and doing drugs," he said, "I always had this very specific voice inside of me that goes, 'One day, you're going to come to a crossroads, or a fork in the road, and it'll be the final one. You're either going to choose to get out of this [expletive], or you're never going to get out of it.'"

That pivotal moment arrived in 2006 when his wife, actress Nicole Kidman, staged an intervention. She gave him an ultimatum: choose between her and his addictions. Urban, who had first entered rehab in 1998 for alcohol and cocaine abuse, checked into the Betty Ford Center again in October 2006. "She's just the one, that was it," Urban previously shared in an interview. "She's the one that I was searching for my whole life, and everything not only changed but had to change in me if I was going to go that road."

Urban admits that growing up in an alcoholic home made sobriety an important but difficult path. In September 2024, he released "Break The Chain," a very personal song about stopping the generational cycle of addiction. He also wrote the song "Thank You" from his Defying Gravity album in 2009 in honor of Kidman for the role she played in his recovery.

In a 2017 interview with The Tennessean, fellow artist Brantley Gilbert credited Urban for helping him realize that sobriety was possible while maintaining a music career. "If it weren't for him, I don't know if I'd be sober or be in the business anymore. I'd probably be dead," Gilbert said.

Urban continues to thrive creatively, writing hits both drunk and sober, and is now among a growing list of country artists who've turned their lives around through sobriety.