Country superstar and Season 4 American Idol champ Carrie Underwood is continuing the rollout of her 5th full studio album, Storyteller today with the debut of a new track that you can get by pre-ordering the album at Itunes!
“Heartbeat,” a romantic midtempo, cowritten by Zach Crowell, Ashley Gorley and Carrie, is the female answer to the rural imagery-filled and pop/light R&B-influenced Luke Bryan romantic midtempos like “Drunk on You” and his current hit “Strip It Down” that have been smashing at country radio over the past few years. Thankfully though, “Heartbeat” avoids a lot of the hackneyed imagery typical of Luke Bryan’s songs, unfolds in a much more literate way and feels a little more lived-in thanks to some convincing purring from Carrie in the verses.
The track is produced to current country radio (not surprising, because the track’s producer, Zach Crowell, co-produced Sam Hunt’s Montevallo), so it kicks off with electronic percussion before bringing in real instruments. The sound of the song stands in contrast to Carrie’s comments that her album leans more “twangy” and “traditional” than her previous work (something backed up by lead single “Smoke Break”), but she had also noted that some of the album has a rock feel and some has a “R&B flair.”
To DOWNLOAD Carrie’s new song, “Heartbeat,” click HERE!
That “Heartbeat” is a romantic song comes as somewhat of a surprise, because Carrie has said on numerous occasions that she is not big on singing love songs. She recently told the Nashville media that she often finds love songs to be too “static” and that was the last person to be into the song as she, Zach Crowell and Ashley Gorley were writing it, but that there was something “conversational” about the lyric that made her feel like it was something she might say to her husband, Mike Fisher.
Indeed, the first verse of the song establishes a relationship between the singer and the person she’s singing, too, as they weigh their options as to what they’re going to do that night and we get glimpses of what a night out on the town might be like for them. The rest of the song lays out the fantasy of a night somewhere outside the reaches of city lights and radio broadcasts – not a hugely original idea in country music but one that “Heartbeat” presents in a convincing way because it does something that country music is supposed to be good at: conveying little moments (like “standing on your shoes in my bare feet”) that makes the song feel both more vivid and more grounded. The song also reads as genuine to Carrie because she’s a known introvert who prefers quiet, and she and her husband have both talked about their desire to live out on a farm where they have space and can’t hear cars or other signs of human activity around them.
As noted by Kurt Trowbridge at Pulse, Carrie will continue previewing songs from Storyteller with next Friday’s release of “Renegade Runaway,” (which Carrie cowrote with Chris DeStefano and Hillary Lindsey and the 10/19 release of “What I Never Knew I Always Wanted,” her song about her husband and her baby boy Isaiah.
Carrie will promote her album with a 10/22 live streamed New York concert for IHeartRadio, a 10/23 live performance on NBC’s Today Show and more (performances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Ellen are confirmed, but no date was been officially released for either). She is also set to perform at and co-host the 49th Annual CMA Awards on Wednesday, November 4th on ABC and she’ll be the guest judge on Project Runway’s season finale, which airs on Lifetime on November 5th.
What do you think of “Heartbeat”?
