Inside Carrie Underwood's Songwriting Sessions

Carrie Underwood photo courtesy of SonyBMG Nashville.

December 26, 2007 — Carrie Underwood, who co-wrote four songs on her best-selling Carnival Ride album, spent three days with a dozen songwriters at the Ryman Auditorium learning the craft.

"We kind of hung out there," Carrie told USA Today recently. "We ate on the stage. We thought it would be a nice place to get inspiration from. I'm the kind of person that, if I got in there and wrote and it was bad, I'd be, like, 'I'm not a writer; I'll let the professionals handle this. But it was something I definitely wanted to see if I could do."

The three-day retreat at the Ryman offered Carrie a break from the whirlwind pace of her career. In the place where Hank Williams and Patsy Cline once sang and Johnny Cash taped his TV show, she got to write with such top tunesmiths as Craig Wiseman, whose credits include Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying."

Each morning at the Ryman, the songwriters broke up into groups of two or three to write in the venue's dressing rooms. Carrie would team up with writing partners, but she would also roam from room to room throughout the day, acting as a sort of quality-control expert for works in progress.

"If you can catch somebody in the beginning stages of a song and say, 'I don't think I'd sing it that way,' or 'This isn't a subject matter I really want to talk about,' nobody wastes time," she said.

In the evenings, the writers recorded demos of the day's songs on the Ryman stage with producer Mark Bright. Carrie had a hand in writing dozens of songs. "Once I got comfortable with people, I had no problems chiming in," she said. "I realized that whatever I said wasn't going to be stupid. Because everybody says 50 things before they decide on a word — you go through 50 before you pick out one."