‘Dancing With The Stars’: Carrie Underwood’s ‘Southbound’ Soundtracks Hannah Brown and Alan Bersten’s Samba

Carrie Underwood was on Dancing With The Stars this week… sort of. “Southbound,” the third single from Underwood’s 2018 album Cry Pretty, was picked as song for Hannah Brown‘s contemporary dance with pro partner Alan Bersten. The performance was praised by judges Bruno Tonioli, Len Goodman and Carrie Ann Inaba.

The dance earned Hannah and Alan a 24/30, thanks to all 8s from the three judges.

During the pre-dance video, Hannah told Alan how much she missed being with her parents during the week through tears. He then surprised her by bringing her parents from Alabama to Los Angeles to visit her.

Hannah said “Southbound” “obviously reminds me of home.”

“With this Samba routine, I really want to make them proud and pay tribute to the South and my home,” Hannah said.

Underwood wrote “Southbound” with Josh Miller and co-producer David Garcia. The upbeat party song even got a fun-in-the-sun inspired music video, showing Underwood having fun with her family, friends and 4-year-old son Isiah.

The song was not an easy one for Underwood to write, despite the fun theme.

“I don’t know if there was one specific line that was the hardest to write, but there was a song called ‘Southbound,’ that was kind of surprisingly hard to write for being just a fun light song,” Underwood told CMT. “But because it was a fun party song it was interesting just to write it not from some [guy] singing it. It’s a lot easier to write a party song if you’re a guy.”

In another interview, Underwood said she got the title first before getting to work on writing it.

“I was like, ‘This sounds like fun, I think. We can do something fun with this,’” she said in another interview. “But then you realize how tricky for some reason it is to be a woman and write kind of a drinking party boat song. It’s strange. You wouldn’t think it would be any different, but for some reason, I feel like a guy could get away with saying this line that we just threw out there, but I can’t for some reason.”

Underwood later explained, “It surprisingly took us a while to write it but by the end of it, it was like, ‘Well, this is a lot of fun… I feel like everybody kind of gravitated towards that one when we were all done with it.”

Dancing With The Stars airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

Photo credit: Getty Images