Keith Urban Calls Nicole Kidman an 'Extraordinary Mum'

Keith Urban struck gold when he married Nicole Kidman. The New Zealand native shares daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret with the actress, and says he can't imagine being a parent without her.

"She's an extraordinary mum, she really, really is," Urban boasts. "Those girls are very, very lucky, and I feel very lucky that the children I should have in this world happen to be with Nic. I don't know anything about raising kids and Nic does."

Kidman also shares two adult children, Isabella and Connor, with her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, which made her well-versed in being a mother.

"I's really made for an experience I wouldn't have had without that," he adds. "Her patience, her recognizing them as people and not just little kids is really extraordinary. Her attention to honoring their feelings and listening to them right from day one, really being attentive to that is not how I was raised at all, so it's really beautiful to see."

Kidman is Urban's muse for much of his music, including a song, "Gemini," from his recent Graffiti U album, co-written by Urban along with Julia Michaels, Justin Tranter and Ian Kirkpatrick.

"Julia and Justin asked me about Nic, they go, 'Tell us about your wife,'" Urban tells Rolling Stone Country. "I said, 'Well, you know, she's Gemini.' Julia started singing, 'Baby she's both,' just that line... The whole song started to unfold from there. So I told them more about my wife and I said, 'She is Gemini, but she's not a contradiction. She can roll with things.' And there was the opening line right there. It was quite therapeutic to get it all out."


With a lyric that includes, "She's a maniac in the bed / But a braniac in her head / And I know that everybody knows / Ooh, that she's both / Wears a lot of light dress / But she's pretty even in a mess," the singer-songwriter wasn't initially sure he wanted to be that forthright about his personal life in his music.

"My first reaction was, 'Oh, I don't know if I'd say that,'" says Urban. "And [Michaels] goes, 'You pretty much just did.' It's really one of the things I love about the way she writes. It's unfiltered. It's pure. It's truth. It was such a playful song, that in the context of that kind of song, which is super sexy to begin with, it just went together for me."

Download Graffiti U on iTunes.