30 Song Challenge Post #13: A Guilty Pleasure Song: "I Know You Won't" by Carrie Underwood
Sigh. Okay, now let me qualify this answer just a little bit. I have gone back and listened to the album version of this song, and I am pretty bored. this is a perfect example of when live music MURDERS the recorded version.
When I first heard this song, it was when she performed it live at an awards show. Queen Latifah introduced her, and I left it on as I was busy with something else. The lyrics are pretty bleak, all about a man that she tries to understand and wants to believe in, but she has finally gotten to the point that she knows without a doubt that she just can't believe a word that he says. How very typically country, but for some reason, this damned song has never left my brain.
When I fight with my husband, I sing this in my shower and it is so cathartic. Carrie is very quiet in the verses of this song, but the chorus is booming, soaring, beautifully declarative.
You say you'll call, but I know you
and you say you're comin' home,
But I know you
You say you'll call,
But I know you won't..."
and that is where she sold me. She just HOLDS it in such earnest.. I know you wont.....
How many times have we talked ourselves into something that we knew not to be true simply because we couldn't bear to look at what truth lied beneath all of the hope and compromise?
When you have a bad egg, you KNOW it, but by the time you know it, you are usually already in love and therefore locked in. I keep saying it, but it has never stopped being true: I will always respond greatest to a writer that can just say it. When she slips from her pretty serenade into the last leg of the song and lets that grit into her voice, you can feel that this is not a song written to fill album space (which is how the recording comes off)but that this is about a very specific somebody. there is a loss in that voice, a sound that says I am not quite over it. Unfinished. And frankly, maybe that's because she didnt write it ( written by Wendell Mobley, Neil Thrasher, McEwan), but she certainly sang it like she did!
I'm telling you, by the time it hits 3:56, it is full on GREAT!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gwoFgOt9o
