Rating: 8/10

Yes, Carrie Underwood has new music. I think we all knew that if we were living anywhere on the planet this week, so let’s get right to the point.

This song so blatantly flaunts established country radio convention that it becomes necessary to make a list of things it does to fly in the face of that institution.

• it’s a mid-tempo ballad, not some upbeat summer anthem
• it contains actual steel guitar
• it features four female songwriters which must be some sort of unspoken crime in Nashville
• it actually speaks to the female perspective instead of whatever “Female” thought it was doing
• there’s actual emotion, but it’s nothing to do with love or anything else stereotypical

And yet, Carrie Underwood has the gall to release this to country radio–not only that, to choose to release it despite the pressure to release her Super Bowl anthem “The Champion” which featured Ludacris instead. That song, despite not being country in the slightest and not being very good in whatever genre it landed beyond its original purpose, probably would have done well in today’s radio environment. Yet she chose this decidedly country pop song and exercised leadership with that decision, more than we can say for many other mainstream country artists.

The song itself starts off with just Carrie and some very faint electric guitar, and credit to her for being very restrained at the beginning and slowly building throughout the song to reflect emotions getting out of hand and becoming uncontrollable. She’s singing about those times when our emotions get the best of us; we can fake it with a”pretty lie” or brush it off with a “pretty smile,” but it’s impossible to “cry pretty.” She asserts that crying is human and all part of being a person and a woman–it could be in response to the way she removed herself from the public to heal after injuring her face, but the details are vague. The vagueness is both a drawback to the song and a thing that will keep it more relatable to a wider audience. This is Carrie Underwood, famous singer, always in the spotlight, actually being vulnerable and making herself an equal with all of us. It’s why this song will work–it shows that she’s really not that different to any of us, and it will speak to people because of that.

And it will most likely get played on country radio as well because it’s Carrie Underwood we’re talking about, and she’s pretty much one of the only women guaranteed to have success in the format. Credit to her for taking advantage of that position and releasing this song, adding her name to the growing number of artists channeling good singles out into the mainstream.

Written by: Carrie Underwood, Lori McKenna, Liz Rose, Hillary Lindsey