Music Review: Carrie Underwood: Carnival Ride

Carrie Underwood: Carnival Ride, 2007

“Sometimes even crazy dreams come true.”   That quote, from the song “Crazy Dreams” makes this whole C.D. worthwhile, although it has other things to recommend it.  Underwood is quite the singer, and her powerful voice dominates this entire selection of music.  Underwood sings of love; mostly have men who have fallen away from her, and how she is getting over them.  However in “I Told You SO” she sings from the other perspective, of what if she went back to a guy she left, but she won’t bug him anymore because she has finally found someone else.  This song has a really good feel and it brings me back to listen again.  Other songs I liked where “Just a Dream” where she sings the pain of a woman who has lost her love in war; “All-American Girl” where she sings of a father’s and then a husbands love; and “So Small, where she points out that sometimes we make our troubles seem like mountains, when in fact they are so small when we figure that love is the thing that really matters: 

'Cause sometimes that mountain you've been climbing is just a grain of sand
What you've been up there searching for
forever is in your hands
When you figure out love is all that matters after all
It sure makes everything else
seem so small

They final number is where we get the title of the C.D., “Wheel of the World: reminds us that life is like a carnival ride, where some are getting off and some are getting on:

God put us here on this carnival ride
We close our eyes
Never knowing where it will take us next
Babies are born and at the same time, someone's taking their last breath

This is good stuff and very enjoyable.  Maybe “country” is my thing.  When Underwood sings with more perspective, reflecting on life, and babies and death, her songs carry a deeper meaning than those dealing superficially with relationships.