Carrie Underwood’s ‘Storyteller’ Turns 10 This Year
Carrie Underwood released her Storyteller album 10 years ago this year. Carrie co-wrote or wrote most of the songs on the Storyteller album, hence the title.
Carrie does write with some of the best songwriters in the Music City, but she holds her own, and many of the songs on Storyteller climbed to the top of the charts. Underwood is known for her amazing voice, but it’s less well-known that she has such good writing skills to match.
I took an afternoon to go through the entire Storyteller album recently, and I remembered that the album had some amazing hits as well as some hidden gems that were never released as singles. One number-one single on the album was “Church Bells,” which is an incredible song and one of my favorites.
But some of album cuts on the project also made me take notice; I hadn’t listened to them for a while. One of them was the song “Renagade Runaway.” Underwood co-wrote the song with Hillary Lindsey and Chris DeStefano. It’s a gem and could’ve easily, in my opinion, been a single. The song didn’t get a music video either, which is a shame: It would’ve been a great one. The lyrics really lend themselves to visual storytelling: “She’s a sure shot, knock the ash off a smokin’ cigarette / Yeah, that pretty face/ Love you, leave you, play you like a heartbreak bandit / She’s an outlaw, a quick draw / She’ll take it all, so don’t you fall For that renegade runaway, runaway, runaway, runaway / You better run away, run away, run away, run away.”
I remember that Carrie hosted a songwriter round in Nashville to promote the Storyteller album. It was just her and some of the songwriters from the project singing many of the songs as well as some of her earlier hits. One of the songs from that night and another stand-out album cut from Carrie’s Storyteller was “Choctaw County Affair.” It’s interesting that Choctaw County is where she’s from in Oklahoma, but the song translates and really makes an impact with a groove that just won’t quit. It’s one of the few songs from the Storyteller project that Carrie did not write. The song was written by Jason White.
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While Storyteller didn’t include any songs about trucks, just after it came out, Carrie told Cosmopolitan at the time, “If you talk to somebody who didn’t grow up around [country music], they have the stereotype that it’s hillbilly, that we’re all singing about divorces, mama, and trucks.” However, there is one country music stereotype that she feels does hold water. She said, “Trucks though? Trucks will always have a place in country music.”
In the same 2015 article, Carrie said she had two sides to her. She noted that when she’s onstage, she is “not Carrie.” She said yes, she is Carrie Underwood, but “Obviously, I would never run off to Vegas and get drunk and marry a guy or trash some guy’s car [as in the lyrics to “Before He Cheats”]. But everybody has had somebody who’s cheated on them or some jerk they dated.” Most of her fans probably wouldn’t do that either, but they may have wanted to in the past, as Carrie likely did. And that’s one of the the secrets to her success: besides her singing, her stage presence and her songwriting ability, Carrie is first and foremost, relatable.
