Keith Urban often writes about relationships and love — that’s been the case since he started writing and recording music decades ago.

The country superstar was a recent guest on the Q With Tom Power podcast, and he dove into the backstory of his 2002 No. 1 hit “Somebody Like You.” He says that his girlfriend at the time was his inspiration for the love song, but the message he was trying to convey fell flat with her.

“I was in a bad way personally, you know, struggling a lot,” Urban recalls now, 20-plus years later. “I was in a relationship that was not … I was not in a good way.”

He was writing the song from the perspective of the person he wanted to be one day.

“I thought at the time that my girlfriend seems to really love me. I wish I could love myself the way she seems to. So, the song was actually I wanna love someone like you, like you do. I wanna love me like you do.”

“I remember writing it and playing a demo for my girlfriend, not realizing what I’m doing playing this song for her,” Urban says.

“She hears it as a love song. And it finished and she just goes, ‘You’re a f–king hypocrite!’ Then walked out of the room.”

“On the surface it just seemed like this beautiful love song, and she’s like, ‘You don’t wanna love anyone, you’re just an a–hole,'” he says, relaying her interpretation of the song, which held the top chart position for six weeks in 2002.

He adds, “She wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t the guy I was, it was the guy I wished I could be.”

It ended up being a positive thing, because this unnamed girlfriend dumping him would allow him to meet Nicole Kidman in 2005. They were married the next year and are living happily ever after.