You better think before you cheat on vocals with Carrie Underwood.
The country superstar — whose powerhouse pipes have led her to win eight Grammys, including six for vocal performance — is not a fan of singers who can’t deliver the goods when they do their recordings live.
“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,” Underwood, 39, told Rolling Stone.
“Or when I’d go to a concert and hear them drop keys, I was like, ‘You can’t hit the notes! Why’d you record them if you can’t sing them?’ That stuff is important to me.”
Indeed, when Underwood goes from the studio to the stage, she has had no problem bringing her recordings to life with her prized instrument that won her the American Idol title in 2005 (back when people still cared about “American Idol”).
“I love to sing, and I’ve always taken pride in the work I’ve put in on my vocals,” she said. “I do want to sound good.”
And one of the singers who inspired Underwood to become the vocal beast that she is might surprise you: Apparently, she had an appetite for Axl Rose.
“The way I learned how to sing was I would pick really hard vocalists to try to emulate, and his voice always mesmerized me,” Underwood said of the the Guns N’ Roses frontman. “I was like, ‘How is he doing the things that he’s doing?’”
In May, Underwood fulfilled a longtime dream to sing with Rose when they performed “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “Paradise City” together at the Stagecoach festival in Indio, Calif.
“It was many years in the making,” she said. “I’ve been covering Guns N’ Roses my whole life, pretty much, and definitely onstage for the past 15 years. I had asked before if he would ever come sing, or if I could come to him somewhere.”
After “a couple almost maybes,” Underwood finally got her wish.
“I sent him an email and said, ‘We’re so close to you,’ and explained … what he meant to me,” she said. “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.”