Blown Away

The song builds like a storm — which is, literally, what it's about. Opening with eerie, spare production, Underwood's voice carries a detached quality in the verses, as if narrating from inside something dangerous and inevitable. The story concerns a young girl in a tornado shelter, waiting out a storm while her troubled home life rages above and around her, and the production mirrors this with controlled tension that periodically releases into something enormous and dramatic. The chorus opens up with force — drums, full strings, Underwood's voice at full power — before pulling back again, mimicking the weather's rhythm of menace and release. This is one of her most dramatically ambitious recordings, a song that functions almost like a short film. The vocal performance requires her to modulate between vulnerability and intensity, and she handles both with complete conviction. Thematically it explores survival, ambivalence, and a child's complicated relationship with destruction and escape. It's the kind of song that demands to be played loud, in a big space, preferably when actual weather is happening outside. It leaves you feeling wrung out in the best possible way.