Source: theboot.com
Celebrity has not always been an easy mantle for Carrie Underwood, but it’s one the 26-year-old Oklahoma native has learned to shoulder gracefully. And with the release of her third album, ‘Play On,’ Nov. 3rd, she admits she’s becoming more comfortable with life in the spotlight.
“I’m kind of a closed person inherently,” Carrie tells The Boot. “I’m not an easy person to get to know, and I feel like I keep a lot of myself closed off to the world. I think in just writing and growing up, it becomes easier to share yourself a little more. I got to write a lot more for this album and it ended up with over half the album being my songs. You can definitely hear [me as] a person in there in the songs. So it’s really nice to be able to scratch the surface and to be able to open myself up a little more.”
Carrie readily admits life is good right now, both personally and professionally. After all, combined sales of her first two albums — 2005’s ‘Some Hearts’ and 2007’s ‘Carnival Ride’ — are over 10 million. Since winning the fourth season of FOX-TV’s ‘American Idol’ competition, Carrie has won four Grammy Awards and has won the Country Music Association’s female vocalist title three times, as well as three Academy of Country Music’s female vocalist honors. Last spring, she took home the Academy of Country Music’s entertainer of the year award, becoming only the seventh woman in the show’s 42-year history to win the coveted title.
On Nov. 11, Carrie will co-host the CMA Awards for the second year with Brad Paisley, and later in the month, she’ll star in her very own FOX-TV special with Paisley, Dolly Parton and David Cook as her guests. “Life is good,” she says. “I really am in a good place in my life and I think that does show.”
On this crisp fall afternoon, Carrie is sitting in a Nashville studio where she’s been doing interviews, excitedly talking about her new project. With her long blonde hair spilling over one shoulder, Carrie looks comfortably chic in a clingy black sweatshirt dress, smartly accessorized with a red bracelet, red belt and red Marc Jacobs flats. She’s spent the better part of the day doing interviews with radio stations across the country. “I normally wear sweatpants,” she says of her typically relaxed interview attire, “but today I wore a sweat dress!”
Carrie’s goal with the album was to entertain her fans and help take them away from the every day grind. “I generally like to keep politics and whatnot out of the music, because it’s where you go to escape. It’s where you go to feel better about stuff,” she says, “but I think it’s on everybody’s mind. I don’t know if the world is getting worse of if we just know more. Sometimes it seems like there’s just a lot of problems in the world.”
The title track, ‘Play On,’ is an encouraging anthem about perseverance in the face of adversity. “Whenever stuff goes wrong, you’ve just got to get up in the morning and you’ve got to play on, finish your song, finish what your started, even when things don’t look good,” Carrie says of the song’s message. “I’ve been really lucky in my life to where things really haven’t gone wrong that often, but we all have our days … It makes me feel really great when somebody who has been there comes up to me and says, ‘I love this song,’ which has already happened and I’m so excited to hear more stories like that. It’s a really cool inspirational song.”
Related: Carrie Underwood Photo Gallery
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