Trent Harmon on NSFW Meaning Behind Keith Urban-Penned ‘Falling’
American Idol Season 15 winner Trent Harmon was in for a bit of a surprise when he learned that his coronation single, “Falling,” was co-written by Idol judge Keith Urban. “I actually didn’t know that going into [recording the song],” he tells Rolling Stone Country. “Two or three hours before the finale, Keith told me. So right before I went out to sing it, I shook his hand and said, ‘If I win this thing, you did it.'”
Harmon was in for an even bigger surprise the first time he read the lyrics, as the second verse is about oral sex. There’s really no other way to interpret such lines as, “You slide your fingers through my hair and tell me ‘take it slow’/And I know what you want/And so I go down on my knees/I’m here to please.”
“We were listening to [the demo] and reading through the lyric sheet and I said, ‘Oh, wow. Cool, bro!,” Harmon recalls. “I really didn’t know what to say.”
Urban asked the Idol finalist how much of the song he was going to sing on the live broadcast, and Harmon replied that he was only going to do the first verse. Urban’s response: “That’s probably for the best!” However, on the official release of the single, the second verse is intact. As Harmon says, “You’ve got to grow up sometime,” adding that he did not even think about asking to modify the lyric.
Harmon is currently working on his debut album, which will be released on Nashville’s Big Machine Records and is said to be country-leaning.