There are no technical issues to speak of, but it’s the tone she sets that fall flat here, especially on the chorus. Underwood remains a top-tier vocal powerhouse who can elevate even generic and reheated material to new heights (see: “Love Wins”), but she doesn’t do enough to sell the story here. Even the minor chords don’t add any sense of foreboding to the mix! The whole mess makes the narrator’s threats ring hollow, and make both the song and the singer far too easy to ignore. Sure, the drum line is more restrained and swaps out the snare for a wood-block-sounding instrument, and there are some items buried in the background (synth tones, background vocals, even some strings) that could have helped set a darker mood here, but they’re overwhelmed by the guitars (whose tones are too bright and conventional to establish any sort of atmosphere).

The arrangement here is surprisingly bland and generic: It opens with an ominous wail and some chattering whispers that are most annoying than creepy, but slowly reverts to the same arena-ready guitar-and-drum mix that’s already clogging up the airwaves. I was wrong in the most ironic of ways: They didn’t lean into the horror element enough (frankly, there barely leaned into it at all).

Given the number of dark, minor-chord-riddled tracks flooding the airwaves these days, I figured the production was the one thing they couldn’t mess up on this track. Even with the kinda-sorta ghostly theming, there’s simply nothing here to get excited about. Who was going to meet an untimely demise this time? Sadly, the only thing that dies here is my enthusiasm, as the song is nothing more than a presumptuous “you’ll be sorry” heartbreak track, the sort of run-of-the-mill lost-love record that Nashville has been shoveling at us for the last six months. After two years of being relegated to collaborations such as “If I Didn’t Love You” with Jason Aldean, I was low-key intrigued to see Underwood dropping a new single from a new project with a title like Ghost Story. Heck, I’ve written better stories than this.Ĭarrie Underwood’s business cards might read “Big-voiced country-pop diva,” but she’s actually been one of the better storytellers in the genre, with songs like “Jesus, Take The Wheel,” “Just A Dream,” “Blown Away,” “Two Black Cadillacs,” and “Church Bells” in her discography.

Wasted carrie underwood chords