Carrie Underwood slashes cheaters’ tires and country-pop boundaries

Of all the "American Idol" vets to land on their feet in the upper echelons of the pop charts, Carrie Underwood's career feels most secure. There's no weird power struggles with her label, as with Kelly Clarkson; her audience is broader than Clay Aiken's mom battalions; and she doesn't have Chris Daughtry's fixation on adenoidal fourth-wave grunge to ride out.

Instead, Underwood is almost a lab creation designed to perfectly embody modern Nashville values: an earnest, homespun yet media-savvy singer with pop smarts, a reliably giant voice and an eye on potential crossover appeal. She got there through the machinations of reality TV, but at this point "Idol" saturation is so culturally universal that no cowgirl even blinks when CMT made its own knockoff version. 

Underwood does a lot of traditional things right, and it's no accident that she transcended her "Idol" fame into a much bigger career. Her voice and song selections tread into a vague genre-less anxious adolescent territory where every emotion is heightened to ecstatic extremes, and her first instincts are always more toward pop-star moves than the heavy lineage of country singers before her.

 "Jesus, Take the Wheel" is an expert bit of Christian pop that gets its emotional heft from the universally harrowing situation of an averted car crash. "Get Out of This Town" is pure teenage escapism, and "Before He Cheats" is a smoldering poison pen letter that nods to Patsy, Loretta and every other scorned woman getting her comeuppance. 

Underwood's sheer will to be meaningful and accessible ties all this together, and even an awkward cover of "Paradise City" (Carrie, everyone knows you cover only Guns ballads, not their rockers) proved how important the act of crossing over is for her. I wouldn't suggest it for every aspirant country star, but it's a  great tactic for getting famous and staying there.

-- August Brown 

Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times