Out The Cage

Keith Urban opens his The Speed of Now Part 1 album with this energetic, electronically enhanced cut. The country trap artist Breland joins Urban crooning the hook and co-writing the track. "'Out the Cage' began with this idea I had to build upon a '90s English house breakbeat rhythm; I've always loved Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, those kinds of rhythmic energies that make me wanna break something," explained Urban to Apple Music. "The chorus melody was taken from a quick banjo riff I kept playing. Breland said we should sing over that riff, and so this frenetic song about breaking out from whatever confinement and oppression that was imprisoning us took off."

This was one of three or four The Speed of Now Part 1 tracks written during the Covid lockdown. Though the song's lyrical content about freeing yourself reflects the circumstances Urban found himself in, the singer told The Boot it has a more general meaning than quarantining. "When we were writing the song," he explained, "I said, 'I really, really want this to be a song that speaks to liberation of all sorts, even if that's somebody in a dead-end job, somebody that's stuck in a relationship that's going nowhere and they can't get out, someone who's sort of imprisoned in their own mind."

So how did Urban hook up with Breland? He explained to Billboard that after "My Truck" and a few other things he did in 2019 attracted his interest, he read an interview that Breland did around June 2020. "The way he was talking about music and his creative process, it just spoke to me," said Urban. "I didn't know him. I got his phone number from a friend and I just cold-called him." Urban invited Breland to his studio and they ended up writing three songs together, including The Speed of Now Part 1 tracks "Out the Cage" and "Soul Food."