Carrie Underwood took a few detours before her ninth studio LP, first realising a long-time dream of recording a gospel album via 2021’s My Savior. Where that album found Underwood turning inward, Denim & Rhinestones is an exuberant return to form from the “Before He Cheats” superstar, chock-full of festival-ready anthems (“Pink Champagne”), scorched-earth send-offs (“She Don’t Know”) and a healthy dose of rock ’n’ roll (“Crazy Angels”). “I want to have fun,” Underwood tells Apple Music. “I want to think about going out on the road. I want to think about being on tour. I want to think about being with people again and how these songs are going to translate in front of people. So, that's what we did. We didn't think about it too much. We made music that really felt good, that feels good to sing, that felt fun to write.” Below, Underwood walks Apple Music through several key tracks on Denim & Rhinestones. “Pink Champagne” “It’s just fun. The music is super fun. It's super happy. It's bubbly. When we wrote it, it was just a fun, easy day, and it's one of those that you want to sing along with.” “Ghost Story” “‘Ghost Story’ was very difficult to sing. That was the one that by the end of it, I was like, ‘Don't we have it?’ And I don't ever do that, because I will sing a song 20 times in the studio, longer than that, however many times I have to sing it. And I feel like I can keep going. And if I don't feel like I have it but the producer over the years has been like, ‘I think we got it,’ I'm like, ‘Nope. Nope. I haven't reached it. I'm not there yet. I feel like I still got some gas in the tank. I want to see what I can do with it.’ But ‘Ghost Story’ was hard. It was the hill to climb, for sure.” “She Don’t Know” “It’s just playing a character, and it's fun to go there. And especially a song like ‘She Don't Know’. It is a cheating song, but it's still got this cinematic quality in that you just play the movie in your head. And you can see these characters that you have in your head; you can just see the girl in her heels, pushing the little cart down the aisle.” “Garden” “I had a garden before, but hadn't really invested myself into it that much. But I had a lot of time to do that in 2020. It's something that I love so much for a lot of reasons. I do love having our own food for health reasons. I love that. But then there's so many life metaphors that you think about when you're in the garden. You think about, ‘Well, which one of these is bearing fruit, and what do I need to do? I need to cut this off because it's not contributing to the plant.’ Growing things, relying on God to make some miracles happen—it is a miracle to me. You have this tiny little seed that means nothing and you stick in the ground, put some water on it, and then magic happens. It's amazing.”