Carrie Underwood celebrates sweeping 2012 with success of "Blown Away"
Checotah native Carrie Underwood may have titled her 2012 album release “Blown Away,” but it’s also an apt description for the five-time Grammy winner’s year, which on all fronts – from touring to airplay, sales, awards, and media appearances – marked an incredibly exciting year for the country music superstar and her fans.
Playing to more than a half million fans throughout her 62-show 2012 “Blown Away Tour,” Underwood not only ranked as the top female country touring artist of the year according to Pollstar’s Year-End chart, she also played her first concerts in Australia and the U.K, where her concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall sold out in only 90 minutes, according to a news release.
The first leg of her “Blown Away Tour,” which will continue into 2013, included home state stops at Oklahoma City’s Chesapeake Energy Arena and Tulsa’s BOK Center. To read my review of Underwood’s OKC show, click here.
The Oklahoma native’s acclaimed fourth album, “Blown Away,” was released in May and quickly became a fan favorite, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard country and all-genre sales charts and logging a total of seven weeks atop Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart in 2012. Nielsen SoundScan tallies show “Blown Away” among the year’s best-sellers, ranking as the No. 2 country album and No. 7 album in all genres. Now certified platinum, “Blown Away” has already launched back-to-back platinum-certified digital singles with the chart-topping tracks “Blown Away” and “Good Girl.”
Her singles for “Good Girl” and “Blown Away” collectively spent a total of three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard and Country Aircheck country airplay charts, more than any other female country artist in 2012.
Her success continued on the video front as well, with “Good Girl” logging a record-setting 14 weeks at No. 1 on CMT’s Top 20 Countdown and becoming the show’s No. 1 video of the year. Similarly, her cinematic video for “Blown Away” also became a runaway favorite, achieving an unprecedented cumulative 14 weeks at No. 1 during its 15-week run on GAC’s fan-voted Top 20 Country Countdown.
Already a five-time Grammy winner, Underwood’s December Grammy nomination for Best Country Solo Performance for “Blown Away” (which also earned a Best Country Song nomination for writers Josh Kear and Chris Tompkins) marked another highlight in an award-filled year that saw the 2005 “American Idol” winner walk away with her seventh American Music Award. Her AMA win for Favorite Country Album is not only her fourth win in as many albums, but also the first time in AMA history that an artist has captured the country album category on every album released. At the American Country Awards, she extended her reign as the most-awarded artist in the show’s three-year history, now with 11 ACA wins, with a pair of 2012 honors including Artist of the Year: Female.
