Keith Urban Used a Merle Haggard Song as Inspiration for This Hit Single From 2018

In 2018, Keith Urban released “Coming Home”. Urban sings “Coming Home” from his Graffiti U album with Julia Michaels. The two artists wrote the feel-good song with Nicolle Galyon and J.R. Rotem. However, Merle Haggard is also listed as a writer, even though the song came out two years after Haggard passed away.

Urban intentionally borrowed from Haggard’s “Mama Tried” when creating “Coming Home”. 

“‘Coming Home’ started with an idea to take a sample from an iconic country song,” Urban says. “I had a few in mind, but Merle Haggard’s ‘Mama Tried’ is the one that kept coming to my way of thinking of using it as an anchor to try another song from.”

“I was really taken with the idea of, have a song be used in a new way that can potentially find a whole new audience,” he continues. “They’ll go out and find ‘Mama Tried’, people that had never heard that song.”

What Inspired Keith Urban to Write “Coming Home”

Haggard passed away in 2016, so Urban couldn’t reach out to The Hag for permission. Instead, Urban called his wife, Theresa Haggard, to ask if he could use part of “Mama Tried”.

“I called up Theresa Haggard when we created a lot of this song, so that she knew what we were working on, and that I had the utmost respect for Merle,” Urban shares. “I wanted her blessing on this track.”

It was Michaels who gave Urban the idea for what became “Coming Home”. The song says in part, “Yeah I know it’s only one call away / But it’s not the same / There’s a place that I know where they all know me / I gotta get back now to the ones who love me.”

“I was out in LA, working with Julia Michaels,” says Urban. “We were talking about why you need to come home, physically, sometimes. And she said, ‘Well, I know it’s only one call away, but it’s not the same.’ I was so taken by how simple that line is, how just incredibly simple it is, and yet that summed up the entire song’s spirit right there.”

The conversation with Michaels inspired “Coming Home”, but the song still, in many ways, points back to Haggard.

“I didn’t set out to write a song about coming home,” Urban explains. “But when I heard that Haggard lick, it kept making me think of that. I remember writing it and looking at it and going, ‘Oh! This song is about coming home. Okay.’ I love how, for me, a lot of times the music tells the story, or draws the story out, versus the other way around.”

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