When Carrie Underwood won American Idol, Simon Cowell boldly stated on national TV as she was still crying from happiness that she would sell more albums than anyone else from the show.  And he was right.  She is still the top seller from an AI winner.  Of the roughly 16 million albums she has sold in total, about half of them were her debut album, Some Hearts, which by any measure is a career defining album by far.   This album won about every award you can and this song was the major driving force behind it.  This video too was a major part of this song’s success as it solidified her as someone who could sing more than songs in the Jesus Take The Wheel mode.  This song also won about every award a song can, and was a massive hit on the Country Charts and Pop Charts too.  This was the 4th single released from this album and is the song that absolutely sling-shotted her to total superstardom.  I feel what fans really liked about this song, album, and her in those early years was her then “realness.”  She was like one of us and we cheered for her as her dreams played out right in front of us on one of the biggest TV shows of all time.  Now all these years later, this is still the song that gets played the most from her library.  Every artist hopes for a song this big in their career.  This is the song that without any question made Carrie Underwood a major star and helped define the new stars of the new century.

Songs Of The New Century – Defined