Carrie Underwood, playing Mandalay Bay, pushes back

Carrie Underwood will show more of an edge at her Mandalay Bay concert Saturday.

She sounds like she’s speaking to a younger version of herself.

“Hey good girl, with your head in the clouds,” Carrie Underwood sings on “Good Girl,” the opening track from her most-recent album, “Blown Away.” “I bet I can tell what you’re thinking about.”

That’s such a safe wager that it ceases to qualify as a wager at all.

Flash back to when Underwood first picked the lock on America’s heart in 2005 when she won “American Idol” and released her debut album, “Some Hearts,” a record so sugary sweet, it could remedy insulin shock.

She seemed less a flesh and blood creation than something born of a Mattel assembly line, as precisely put together and market-tested as a new line of Barbie doll.

Three albums later, Underwood remains undeniably wholesome, almost good for you, even, like eating your broccoli.

But at the same time, she’s gone from the most idealized notion of the mythical girl next door to a woman with at least something of an edge.

Just look at the album cover for “Blown Away.”

On it, Underwood looks like a supermodel caught in an thunder storm, a luminous silver gown flowing out behind her.

She’s not smiling.

Instead, her expression is one of steely, purposeful resolve.

Compare this to the “Some Hearts” cover, where she’s captured beaming in the sun, holding a flower, looking as pure and natural as its white petals.

Among that album’s signature hits: “Jesus, Take the Wheel.”

But on “Blown Away,” Underwood’s a woman more in control of her fate, determined to stand up for herself, refusing to be taken advantage of.

On the album’s title track, she gives voice to a girl hoping for a tornado to come and sweep her no-good father away.

“Two Black Cadillacs,” a dramatic, piano-flecked rocker with symphonic flourishes, revolves around a pair of women at the funeral of a man two-timing them both, with intimations that they were responsible for his death.

On “Cupid’s Got a Shotgun,” Underwood dodges love’s bullets, even firing back herself.

“I pulled out my Remington and I loaded up these shells,” she sings. “He’s about to find out I’m a dang good shot myself.”

The females in these songs are assertive and dauntless, something that Underwood has also become.

Clearly, she can see herself in these characters.

None of this is to suggest that Underwood has been a shrinking violet up to this point.

On “Last Name,” from 2007’s “Carnival Ride,” she gets drunk and winds up married to a stranger in Vegas; on “Before He Cheats,” from her debut, she takes a Louisville Slugger to the truck of a philandering ex.

To brand her as a precocious, wide-eyed Pollyanna in the past, then, isn’t wholly accurate.

Nevertheless, Underwood has been marketed as America’s sweetheart from the get-go, and only now are we seeing her really push against that role.

She’s not the deer-hunting spark plug that Miranda Lambert is, but “Blown Away” sees her blossoming into a woman with her own brand of willfulness.

In this way, Underwood has become the true heir to cosmopolitan, yet commanding country queens such as Shania Twain and Faith Hill.

This doesn’t mark a radical shift in direction for Underwood.

Instead, it’s the result of a slow and steady evolution into a woman who no longer seeks assistance when behind the wheel, steering in the direction of her choosing instead.

“Sometimes life leads you down a different road,” she sings knowingly on “Good in Goodbye,” another “Blown Away” track, with said road unfolding behind her in the rearview mirror.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.