Carrie Underwood is back in Vegas. Her summer schedule found her wrapping her Denim & Rhinestones Tour, opening for Guns N’ Roses, filming promotional video for Sunday Night Football at Resorts World Las Vegas and making a pilgrimage to the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville for a two-night, four-set engagement. Then she returned to her Reflection: The Las Vegas Residency for the first time since the launch of her Sirius XM station, Carrie’s Country.
Underwood was ready to see some familiar faces, she said in a phone interview with Las Vegas Magazine. That isn’t always possible on tour, when she can’t see past the first several rows. “I feel like when we’re in Resorts World, that theater is so great,” said Underwood. “They did such a great job of setting it up; it is very easy to just see everybody. For me, that’s the best part. I see familiar faces. I see fan club members. I see people that I’ve met before. I see people from all over the world in the audience.”
Resorts World Theatre enables Underwood to enjoy fans enjoying themselves, generating shared energy that fuels her performances. Connecting with the audience, the songs, her band and the stage environment comes natural to her.
“I feel like the Opry is very easy and homey and comfortable,” she said from her tour bus, which was parked near the 4,400-seat venue. “Whenever we play here, we kind of get the chance to do stuff we don’t maybe normally do on tour or in Vegas. We can throw in a deep cut or something just because I want to (laughs). So it’s really whatever I feel like, which is a lot of fun. I feel like people that come to see these shows kind of get something unique.”
People who came to see her open for Guns N’ Roses got to see something unique as well when she covered songs such as Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” and Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” the latter of which was played before she took to the stage during the Denim & Rhinestones concerts.
“I was super nervous going into the whole thing because it’s not my audience,” she said. “I haven’t been an opening act in a very long time and I would only do it for Guns N’ Roses. When they called us up and said, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?' I was like, ‘Yeah, you could pay me in tickets! I’ll sit up there and watch the show and just have fun.'”
A recent Friday-night Reflection show coincided with the prerelease date of the deluxe edition of Denim & Rhinestones. The original 2022 album found her in a phase where she was very conscious of free-form aspects of the current musical landscapes.
“It’s like there are no rules anymore,” she said. “I felt like when we were writing and recording and stuff, I just wanted to be creative and make music that I wanted to listen to, and that’s what we did. ... It was just like, ‘What do we want to create?’”
Resorts World Las Vegas, axs.com
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