Carrie Underwood is just like all of us; she sang along with all her favourite Martina McBride songs, using the steering wheel as her drums and as her microphone. We all dream about being the person singing back at us on the radio. With American Idol to thank, she had her dreams fulfilled.
Her second album, Carnival Ride, had, at the time, been the awaited follow-up album to her first album, Some Hearts. Looking back, she aptly chose a Bonnie Raitt single as her first audition song, because of all the hoops she and Raitt had to jump through to become the big stars they are today. Underwood, however, chose the country side of the blues genre, and she really did make the right decision.
All the American Idol winners tend to fall into the cookie-cutter style of music they pursue. Carrie, on the other hand, with influence from her roots and early country, blazed herself a new road. She said in a Arista Nashville press release that "You step onto this ride called life, and it's a crazy thing you don't know anything about, but you get on it anyway. You do what you can to lean different directions to try and get it to go where you want it to go, but you can't stop it - it just keeps moving. That's why Carnival Ride works as my album title, because it describes the wonderful craziness that I've been through over the past couple years."
As you listen to the album, you can hear all the experiences she has pulled from in her life. You listen to how she was vulnerable, how she needs sympathy and how she can make fun of events. For example, the lyrics in You Won't Find This explain to the listener how you may think you have planned for everything and have everything ready, but life always ends up throwing a monkey wrench into your plans and you have to find another path because "Just in case the route you take isn't there to take you back."
Other songs, however, show us that even the - what we think are - impossible tasks can become reality. The song called Crazy Dreams is all about the "hair brush singers and dash-board drummers." No matter what, says the song and Carrie, your wildest dreams can come true. With the peppy beat, it makes even the biggest kid want to reach for the stars. She can draw from the experience of being one of millions of teenagers looking at posters at concerts and having that desire to be up on the stage, and having her idol open up for her concert.
One of the last songs of the album, entitled The More Boys I Meet, shows her humour in boys, and the more she meets boys, "the more I love my dog." She explains how all the boys want to move through relationships too fast, and how us guys always find things that a woman won't find funny to be funny.
When I first grabbed this disc, the first song I listened to was the cover of Randy Travis' I Told You So. I was interested to see how she could turn the Travis song into her own. She passed with flying colours. She channelled her inner Bonnie Raitt and sang it with the same heart Raitt sang. She made it her own, without wrecking the integrity of the song and thus capped off a very successful album. While I Told You So wasn't released as a single, a re-recorded version featuring Travis was. The deep Travis voice and a very passionate Underwood nailed it. For their work, they won the Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals.
Overall, Underwood's success (in my opinion) hinged on whether this album was a winner, and clearly it was. All of her singles, with the exception of her duet with Randy, hit #1 on the billboard country list, with each holding for at least two weeks.
Her ability to cover a wide range of emotions, write songs and even cover a very well-known country artist's work have not gone unnoticed. Her gift to sing is amazing, although she is still young and, like all artists, the true test begins when she hits her 40s. If she can stay invigorated like Bonnie, Randy, Alabama, and other country/blues superstars, she, herself, can be mentioned along with the aforementioned artists. After all, everybody loves an All-American Girl.
The Heilman Rating: 8/10
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