The new Carrie Underwood Sunday Night Football song premiered last night during the Week 1 Green Bay Packers - Chicago Bears game. The fresh new theme, "Game On," replaces Underwood's old hype song, "Oh, Sunday Night."
"It's Sunday night / America's game on NBC / the home, the place to be / game on, game on / it's Sunday night," Underwood sings in the new track written specifically for Sunday Night Football. To write the song, Underwood worked alongside Chris DeStefano and Brett James, the team (plus Ludacris) she created "The Champion" with, which was used during Super Bowl and Olympics coverage.
Underwood, DeStefano, James and Priscilla Renea wrote the previous theme track for SNF, "Oh, Sunday Night." They used the catchy tune of Underwood and Miranda Lambert's hit "Somethin' Bad" paired with new NFL-themed lyrics. Before the shift to "Oh, Sunday Night" in 2014, the show's theme song was "Waiting All Day For Sunday Night," performed by Pink, Faith Hill, and then, Underwood.
New @SNFonNBC Open featuring #GameOn performed & co-written by Carrie along with @destefanomusic & @BrettJamesMusic. Take a look behind the scenes now!
More Info: https://t.co/tQY4ZPYfQc -TeamCU pic.twitter.com/4VJKKXhXxL— Carrie Underwood (@carrieunderwood) August 30, 2018
Read More: Carrie Underwood to Country Radio Programmers Saying Women Don't Want to Hear Women: 'That's B.S.'
To mark the new musical era, the Sunday Night Football opening also needed a visual revamp. This season, 10 standout NFL players (like Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott) appear in the dramatic video along with shots of a few major cities in America. Downtown cityscape visuals give the track an even larger scale as Underwood brings the energy up into an intimidating fever by slo-mo walking next to sparks and flames.
As Tripp Dixon said in the video above, "Carrie brought us [the] new song, and it kind of inspired us to get out of the soundstage. Any time you work with a big star like Carrie and combine it with NFL's best, you know it's going to be big, and you know it's going to be fun."
So far, outspoken NFL fans on social media have responded negatively to the new Sunday Night intro song, commenting that they want the old "Ohhhhhhh Sunday Night" track back and threatening to mute the TV while "Game On" is playing. But perhaps the change will just take a while to set in. Before the end of the season, some of the naysayers will probably find themselves singing along to the new SNF song and attempting to hit the high notes along with Underwood.
