It’s too easy for us to say that we were blown away by Carrie Underwood‘s performance of “Blown Away” at the Billboard Music Awards last Sunday, but it’s also too true.
In classic Underwood style, and in every way possible, “Blown Away” is a power ballad: part vocal hurricane, part brilliance in production, and a fully delivered story, complete with a beginning, middle and end.
Back when Carrie Underwood initially started making music following her season-3 “Idol” win, she won over American audiences with story within a song. In “Jesus, Take The Wheel” she talked of a car accident in which the help of her faith allowed a woman and her newborn to walk away untouched. But it wasn’t sappy or overdone, and neither is the new “Blown Away,” the title track from Carrie Underwood’s new chart-topping album. It’s delicately worded, beautifully conceptualized and powerfully sung.
“Blown Away” leads a narrative about a young woman taking shelter in her home during a tornado in rural Oklahoma.
There’s not enough rain in Oklahoma
To wash the sins out of that house
There’s not enough wind in Oklahoma
To rip the nails out of the past
We eventually hear Underwood talk of how the girl left her “mean old mister” alcoholic father on the couch while she waited in shelter for her house to blow down on top of him. In a darkly beautiful fantasy, everything would be “blown away”:
Shatter every window ’til it’s all blown away,
Every brick, every board, every slamming door blown away
’til there’s nothing left standing, nothing left of yesterday
Every tear-soaked whiskey memory blown away,
Blown away
Bringing together a youthful edge with a xylophone intro and slowly building into a storm of a refrain in the listener’s eardrum, the song sails high in capturing exactly what the story brings to the forefront. There’s not much “Blown Away” can be compared to in the spectrum of pop-country today because the song can’t be topped. It’s that spectacular. Watch the Billboard Music Awards performance below, and tell us what you think!
