Carrie Underwood says stitches inside and outside of her mouth made it 'physically impossible' to sing after facial injury
Carrie Underwood is opening up more about the emotional turmoil that followed her 2017 facial injury that left her with 40 to 50 stitches. In an interview with Vulture, the Grammy winning singer said she wasn’t just worried about her physical appearance after the gruesome fall but also about how it would affect her ability to sing.
“I felt like the differences were more in my head than they were in anybody else’s that would listen to the things I was doing,” she explained. “I had wanted to be in the studio sooner than I was, actually recording these songs, but I had stitches inside my mouth, outside my mouth. It was physically impossible.”
Underwood remembered going into the studio for the first time after her injury.
“It was a mind game: ‘Do I sound the same? Is my diction the same? Does my mouth move the same as it did before?'” she recalled. “I would sing something and then look at [writer-producer] David [Garcia] and be like, ‘Did that all come out clearly?’ My m’s and b’s and p’s were kind of the issue. And he was like, ‘I thought it sounded great.’
“Things change just as you get older; your muscles change,” she noted. “I kind of expect I’m not always going to sound like I’m 22 coming off of American Idol. Hopefully I get better.”
Despite her initial insecurities, Underwood chose not to work with a vocal coach. “I feel like you just kind of have to find your way through it,” she said. “I don’t like it when people try to tell me how to sing, because it should be natural.” (She only sought a vocal coach’s counsel once in her career, when she did The Sound of Music.)
Around the same time as her fall, the 35-year-old country superstar was going through a challenging period in her personal life as well. Underwood — who is pregnant with her second child with husband Mike Fisher — recently revealed that she had suffered three miscarriages in two years. The singer was asked about how her emotional pain affected her creative process while making her sixth studio album.
“It wasn’t a conscious thing. It wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna write about this, because this just happened.’ It would be completely inevitable,” Underwood replied. “I’d have a terrible day at the doctor’s office and then come into a writing session and be like, ‘I’m sorry guys. I might suck today. I just got some bad news.'”
Underwood added, “Things aren’t literal, but I look at a song like ‘Low,’ and that was my year last year. It was not about a person leaving or anything like that. I listen to that song now, and there’s a good chance I’ll cry, because it was just so personal. … I was lucky enough to be around people that I felt really comfortable with. I thought, ‘What am I gonna do? Go home and wallow in this all day long? No, I want to keep working. I want to keep pushing forward. This is still something that has to be done.'”
Underwood said she “kinda needed that at the time, just to have something to stay focused on that wasn’t my personal life.”
The “Cry Pretty” singer is gearing up to host this year’s Country Music Association Awards alongside Brad Paisley for the 11th time on Nov. 14.
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