NASHVILLE â€" Carrie Underwood likes to look at the photographs on the backstage walls of the Grand Ole Opry. There's the picture of Randy Travis hugging her after inviting her to join the cast of the radio show years ago, of course, but Underwood especially likes to look at the legends that line the walls â€" Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner, Charley Pride, Tammy Wynette.
"By now, it's so familiar," says the 29-year-old from Checotah, Okla., who performed at the Opry for the first time just weeks after winning American Idol in 2005. "I've played here more than anywhere else I've played, other than my church back home."
Nineteen black-and-white portraits, including those of Loretta Lynn, Connie Smith and the late Minnie Pearl, hang in the Women of Country dressing room. Underwood's photograph is here, too, in a row with pictures of Martina McBride and Emmylou Harris. Underwood usually gets the room when she makes an Opry appearance, as she did a few weeks ago when she performed her latest single, Good Girl, live for the first time.
"It's just this nice sense of home," she says. "The Grand Ole Opry is the heart of country music. It's always here; it's never-changing. People come here and they play here, then they go off and do their own shows. I feel like that's representative of what I do. I'm rooted in country music, but I get to explore, as well, in other things and other influences."
Underwood explores a lot on her new album, Blown Away, out this week. While some of its 14 tracks are among the countriest country she has ever recorded, it's also the kind of album that could broaden her fan base. The album's songs range from the dark drama of the title track and Two Black Cadillacs to the summery pop-country of One Way Ticket, from Who Are You, penned by rock hitmaker (and Shania Twain's ex-husband) Mutt Lange, to the throwback twang of Cupid's Got a Shotgun, which features a guitar solo by friend and Country Music Association Awards co-host Brad Paisley.
Good Girl reached the top 10 of USA TODAY's country airplay chart in just eight weeks and also has crossed over to the Hot AC, or adult contemporary, format.
"It could be an incredibly big record" for the format, says Steve Salhany, vice president of Hot AC for CBS Radio and the operations manager for WTIC in Hartford, Conn., which has already added Good Girl.
Sony Music Nashville chairman/CEO Gary Overton says, "Several radio programmers who have heard the album believe that there are other songs that will be hits at country and pop radio."
Bobby Smith, program director at Orlando Hot AC station WOMX, is one of those. "She's got a couple on there that could be major pop crossover songs," he says. "I think right now, putting out a really good product, she'll jump into the next level of popularity."
Blown Away is Underwood's first album since 2009's Play On. That album sold 2 million copies, less than her first two, though some sales drop-off isn't unusual after the kind of massive success her first album had. Some Hearts, the best-selling debut album from a female country singer, has sold more than 7 million copies and continues to move about 2,000 units each week.
More troubling for Underwood was a sudden dry spell at the awards show that she has co-hosted since 2008. After winning five CMA Awards in three years, including three for female vocalist of the year, many industry observers figured she'd be a lock for entertainer-of-the-year nominations. The competing Academy of Country Music had given her that honor in 2010, and that was before she drew a million fans to her extravagant 2010 Play On tour. But the nomination didn't materialize.
"When you work as hard as we all did with the Play On tour â€" that was a big success and a big tour and a great show, if I may say so myself â€" not to be in the entertainer-of-the-year category in the CMAs did sting," Underwood says. "I just wanted a nomination. Anything after that, you know? But to not even be nominated was like, what am I doing wrong? I could look at it a hundred different ways, and we didn't do anything wrong."
In retrospect, all the quick acclaim and success that followed her American Idol win and first album set her up with unrealistic expectations.
"The first year, I was so lucky: I came in, I got nominations, and I won," she says. "I was like, this is how it is all the time! This is awesome! I get No. 1's for five weeks, six weeks! I start winning stuff! This is just how it happens.
"I got a good lesson in how stuff doesn't always happen like that. And it really was good for me."
Until the past several weeks, Underwood had kept a lower-than-usual profile for about a year. She played only occasionally after her Play On tour wrapped in December 2010. Her biggest hit came in Remind Me, a duet that appeared on Paisley's most recent album, and she also recorded with Tony Bennett and Randy Travis. She used some of that time off the road to get better acquainted with her husband, hockey player Mike Fisher, whom she married in July 2010.
"Mike had shoulder surgery last year right after the season ended, so a lot of that was rehabilitation and taking care of him," she says. "It was just nice to spend time together. He'd go fishing and maybe play golf a little bit. We both did our own thing. It was nice after he moved here last February to have that summer to get used to living with each other."
She also took her time to make an album she knew would be coming at a key point in her career.
"She took nearly a year to compile and record the songs" for the album, Overton says. "Blown Away shows her growth during that time as a mature as well as a fun, creative artist."
Two songs came particularly early: Wine After Whiskey came from the Play On sessions but didn't seem to fit that album. Underwood submitted See You Again for The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, though the film's producers ended up using a different Underwood song, There's a Place for Us.
But it was the title track, a vengeful number about a father-daughter relationship that plays out like a cross between Underwood's biggest hit, Before He Cheats, and Martina McBride's Independence Day, that helped Underwood find her direction for her fourth album.
"Once I got Blown Away, it opened the door for me to be different," she says. "I loved that song so much that, if we had a whole rest of the album that did not fit with Blown Away, I would have kept Blown Away and figured out what we could have done with the rest of the album."
Musically, Good Girl, the album's first single, plays to a love of vintage hair-metal that Underwood has often shown in concert, where she has been known to cover Guns N' Roses and Skid Row, though rarely on record.
"It was enough like what I have done in the past, but also fresh and new and fun, a slight step in a different direction," she says. "We wouldn't scare people, but it sounded different."
Like Good Girl, much of Blown Away shows the influence of '80s music. "I think it's just stuff I gravitate toward," she says. She recalls producer Mark Bright adding an echo effect to her vocals on the title song. "That was a big thing with Def Leppard, all of that hollow vocal sound. And I liked it. So he would go to See You Again and throw a little bit in that. And I'd be like, 'I love that!' Mark would just notice when I would say, 'Turn that up! Make more of that happen!' And he would go off of what I seemed to like."
The same week Underwood released Good Girl, she also signed on to Twitter after years of avoiding the social-networking site.
"I was very scared of it once upon a time," she says. "I get to see Mike do his thing on it. He uses it for good, and not everybody that tweets gets themselves in trouble tweeting. As long as you keep that in mind and have fun with it instead of trying to be so serious about it all the time, then it can be a good thing."
Underwood will tour the U.K. and Australia in June, then start a North American tour in the fall. "Normally, I'd try to head out in the summer, but my husband doesn't play then; he's off in the summer," she says. "So I try to make sure I'm available, just to spend some quality time. So we'll start again in the fall, go for a few months, then probably pick it up again in the spring."
One thing that could throw a wrench into Underwood's plans: the success of her husband's Nashville Predators in the National Hockey League playoffs. They're currently playing a second-round series against the Phoenix Coyotes. The deeper the Predators go into the playoffs, the harder it will be for Underwood to stay away from the games.
"Obviously, if they make it to the Stanley Cup, I'll be canceling anything I have around that time," she says. "I've never canceled anything before, but if they make it that far, I'll be leaving a lot of people high and dry."
Underwood and Fisher will celebrate their second anniversary in July. "I still feel like a newlywed," she says. The couple recently bought some land outside Nashville and hope to build there. "Not anytime soon, because there's so much going on in both our lives," she says. "Obviously, I'm going to be on tour, so I can't exactly make building decisions. But we do plan on getting everything mapped out and slowly building and moving to the country. In 5ish years, something like that."
They're taking a similar wait-and-see approach when it comes to family planning. "We're just not there. Mike's playing, and it would just be really tough for me to do what I do and him to do what he does and us bring a child into the mix," she says. "Something would severely suffer, and I don't think either one of us are quite ready for that to happen yet."
For now, she can work out any maternal instincts on the latest crop of American Idol contestants. On Thursday, she'll return to the show that launched her career. Over the years, she has developed a reputation for sending gifts and notes of encouragement to the contestants.
"I would have loved it if one of the previous Idols had come and said hello to us while I was on the show," says Underwood, who has gotten particularly close to Season 5's Kellie Pickler and last year's runner-up, Lauren Alaina, both of whom came to Nashville after Idol. If Underwood's still a relative youngster in the 86-year-old history of the Grand Ole Opry, with 12 million albums sold and more than a dozen chart-topping singles, she's the standard of success when it comes to Idol. And she cherishes that role.
"I've always been so proud of Idol, and I'm so proud of the contestants that are on it, because they're laying it all on the line. I've done what they want to accomplish â€" not, like, follow in my footsteps, but make their own way and be able to do their own versions of what I've been able to do. I would have loved it. So I pass the love on."
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