Carrie Underwood is more raw, doesn't go for the 'money notes' on new album

Cindy Watts | The Tennessean

Dressed in emerald green sequins and sitting on a couch backstage at Nissan Stadium on Friday night, Carrie Underwood was honest.

It’s a scary time for her. Not because she’s amid re-entering the public eye after her much-publicized fall in November or because she was about to play in front of tens of thousands of people. Underwood was nervous because earlier in the day she had turned in her new album to her new record label, Universal Music Group Nashville.

Underwood’s new album, “Cry Pretty,” will be released Sept. 14. The album is named for her current single, "Cry Pretty," which she wrote with Hillary Lindsey, Lori McKenna and Liz Rose.

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“It feels very much like it’s a new season for me,” she said. “I started working on (the album) last year and spread out my writing a lot more. Even if I’m not on tour, there’s always so much to do. I’d write for a week or two, go somewhere to do something else and then come back. It was interesting how this writing went.”

Now Underwood is playing the waiting game and is anxious to see what everyone else thinks.

“It’s just that scary point when it’s done and you’re like, ‘Oh, is it good? I think it is,’ ” she explained. “But then you’re letting other people see what you’ve been working on for what feels like two-and-a-half years. It’s just nervousness.”

Underwood co-produced the “Cry Pretty” album with David Garcia. The two had worked together before, but Underwood said this time “all of it felt like a gamble.”

“It wasn’t (a gamble) because he’s totally amazing, but I had never worked with him in that capacity,” she said. “It’s not like he has this super long track list of other artists that I know that he’s worked with. I knew I liked writing with him, and I knew we had this magic in our writing combos. But jumping in with him as a co-producer to do the whole thing was … a lot of trust. The gamble just really paid off.”

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It paid off in more ways than one. Since co-producing herself and working with Garcia, Underwood said she discovered new areas of her voice and ways of performing. She said she realized that trying to be perfect wasn’t always the best plan.

“I feel like I’ve always been one to gun for the money notes, and we ended up doing things more subdued at times because of the emotion behind it,” she said, explaining that sometimes the vocals from the demo recordings were the ones they kept.

“I wasn’t thinking about it and it ended up being more emotional," she continued. "It wasn’t planned, which I tend to do because I want it to sound perfect. But then when I would go back in and do the real version, I ended losing some of the emotion because I was thinking too much. It was little things like that I learned from being in the producer chair.”