In a recent interview with Rolling Stone Country, Carrie Underwood explained her disdain for popular singers unable to replicate the hits onstage.
"I love to sing, and I've always taken pride in the work I've put in on my vocals. I do want to sound good," Underwood said. "Growing up and going to concerts or seeing my favorite artists on TV, if they didn't sound like they were supposed to sound, it was always so deflating.
"I'd lose respect for them. Or when I'd go to a concert and hear them drop keys, I was like, 'You can't hit the notes!," she continued. "Why'd you record them if you can't sing them? That stuff is important to me."
In the same interview, Underwood praised a now-obvious influence of hers as an exceptional live vocalist: Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose. Underwood performed her hard rock heroes' "Welcome to the Jungle" on Saturday night (Oct. 15) in South Carolina at the first stop of her headlining Denim & Rhinestones Tour. Over the summer, she sang "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Paradise City" with Rose at Stagecoach festival in Indio, Cal. Soon after, she joined the entire band onstage in London.
"It was many years in the making," Underwood said. "I've been covering Guns N' Roses my whole life, pretty much, and definitely onstage for the past 15 years at least. I had asked before if he would ever come sing, or if I could come to him somewhere. We had a couple almost maybes, where it almost maybe would have happened but for various reasons it wasn't the right time.
"But [for Stagecoach] I asked. I sent him an email and said, 'We're so close to you,' and explained the why and what he meant to me," she continued. "The way I learned how to sing was I would pick really hard vocalists to try to emulate, and his voice always mesmerized me. I was like, 'How is he doing the things that he's doing?' So I told him all that...and he came! We had rehearsals and everything went very smoothly. It was easy for all of us to be around each other. Hopefully, he had a good time."
Before singing with Rose, Underwood told the audience at Stagecoach that her dream-come-true duet was going to seal the "greatest night of my life."
