Carrie Underwood’s latest Cry Pretty album was released on Sept. 14. The record, which marked Underwood’s first time as co-producer while working with David Garcia, was especially challenging for Underwood in one unexpected area.
“This was the hardest album I have had to sequence, period,” Underwood shared with PopCulture.com at a recent media event. “I’ve always sat there and listened to different combinations of other albums. And I’ve always put them in sequence myself. And this one was hard.”
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“I had to have a meeting with David, and I was like, ‘I feel like I can’t do this. Anything I do feels wrong,’” she added. “Because we have some songs that are so deep. But then also we have fun songs on there too.”
Cry Pretty includes thought-provoking songs like “The Bullet,” along with the tender “Kingdom,” and her current single, the anthemic “Love Wins.”
“I was like, ‘If we put the wrong songs next to each other, things are gonna get lost. And it’s not gonna make any sense,’” Underwood said. “It was hard. So this is what we came up with that we could all agree on, which worked the best way. It just all came down to what songs sounded right next to each other. And we do go low with ‘The Bullet’ and ‘Spinning Bottles.’ And then we had to have something that was a little more soulfully uplifting .. Everything else was like this crazy, really hard puzzle.”
The 35-year-old had never even heard of Garcia, much less worked with him, before she began the process of writing and recording for Cry Pretty. But it didn’t take long for Underwood to realize how well they complemented each other.
“He’s like a bass kind of guy,” Underwood said. “I’m like vocals and guitar. The two of us kind of paying attention to different things, and knowing what everybody else was doing, it’s kind of like we had our own things to look out for. It is a lot of responsibility in that this is the most I’ve ever been involved from start to finish, from overdubs and comping my own vocals to trying to tell the musicians what I was hearing in my head.”
Underwood might have worked harder on Cry Pretty than any of her previous five records, but the result is the most personal album the American Idol alum has ever released, covering a lot of what Underwood has recently experienced, including her three heart-breaking miscarriages.
“I feel like there’s a lot of songs, there’s several songs on the album that came from that, or I connect with in a totally different way because of those experiences that we went through,” Underwood said in a recent interview with CBS Sunday Morning. “And they were hard. And it sucked so much! But things are looking better.”
Order Cry Pretty at CarrieUnderwoodOfficial.com.
Photo Credit: Getty images/Shearer – 2018 ACMA
