Keith Urban photo courtesy of Capitol Nashville.

When BMI threw a Music Row party Tuesday to celebrate Keith Urban’s No. 1 single “Only You Can Love Me This Way,” the event took on an international air.

The international part is easily apparent: Not only is Keith Australian, but both of the song’s writers — British-born Steve McEwan and Scottish John Reid — are from across the Pond. But the “air” part of the event was significant, too. Keith spent the bulk of his day flying from Los Angeles to make the Nashville soiree, then travelling back to California before he finally called it a night. John was unable to attend because he was in flight from the U.K. to Thailand.

Despite the global history of the participants, “Only You Can Love Me This Way” has taken foot particularly well on U.S. soil, becoming the second release from Keith’s Defying Gravity album to top the charts.

“It’s amazing,” Steve observed, “that a dodgy Brit and a dodgy Scotsman can get together and write a song — and [get it recorded by] a dodgy Aussie — and it can be No. 1 on the country charts. That’s incredible.”

While Steve’s landed music on albums by the likes of Foreigner, David Archuleta and even Eminem, he’s made the country connection numerous times. Among his previous hits: Kenny Chesney’s “Young” and “Summertime,” Carrie Underwood’s “Just A Dream” and Brooks & Dunn’s “That’s What It’s All About.” John is a former member of Nightcrawlers, a house music act that hung on the Billboard pop chart for 15 weeks in 1993 with a dance track, “Push The Feeling On.”

Built around a lilting guitar riff, “Only You Can Love Me This Way” came from Steve and John’s first songwriting collaboration.

“We ended up in a room together and we didn’t know each other,” Steve noted. “The first thing you start talkin’ about sometimes is things you know a bit about, and I guess the thing we had in common was women. So we started talkin’ about women about an hour. He’d fallen madly in love with a woman. He showed me pictures, and he was really excited about it, and it came out of that really. I started playin’ a little riff, and it just went from there.”

Keith’s producer, Dann Huff, got a copy of the demo and played it for Keith, who took a few liberties to make it work for his vocal range.

“I actually changed the melody in the chorus a little bit in a couple of places, where there’s a very definite falsetto, melodic line that just wasn’t in my singing place to do it right,” he noted. “But I loved what it said so much that I thought, ‘That’s not a make-or-break part of the song to me. The sentiment and the rest of the melody, the guitar riff — all of these elements are really the core of the song.’ So I [tweaked it] to fit me and still not lose the potency of the song.”

BMI, a performing rights organization responsible for distributing royalties to songwriters and music publishers, doled out honors to Keith, Steve, John and Dann, as well as Capitol Records, EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music and management companies 19 Entertainment and Borman Entertainment.

Also making presentations: Country Weekly magazine, the Country Music Association and Country Radio Broadcasters. And Keith gave a shout out to Kyle Young, director of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which benefited from Keith’s $500,000 All For The Hall fundraising concert in October.

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