Carrie Underwood released the music video for her tour de force reemergence rock song "Cry Pretty" Sunday night during last night's episode of American Idol. Needless to say, there is a lot of crying involved. This is the second music video Underwood has released since suffering a traumatic fall last November. The fall left her with 40-50 stitches on her face. For the following five months, Underwood was relatively reclusive — even her first music video back, a piece for the NFL anthem "Champion," barely showed her face. "Cry Pretty" is her big, honking return, replete with glitter tears and a literal shower. (It's a truth universally acknowledged that all dramatic music videos require some sort of bathing scene, okay?)
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Underwood released "Cry Pretty" last month. Shortly after, she performed the song at the American Country Music Awards, her first live performance since the injury. The song is an ode to surviving trauma — the reigning theme is that, while you can pretty smile and pretty lie, you can't "cry pretty." Which is to say, when the shit hits the fan, things are going to get ugly. All told, though, Underwood is very good at crying, both on stage and in music videos. (At the ACMs, she had gems glued under her eyes to look like tears. That is literally crying pretty!) In the music video for the song, Underwood performs on stage wearing giant diaphanous shirtsleeves. Never have drippy shirtsleeves seemed so cool.
In an interview with SiriusXM last month, Underwood revealed that she was nervous to release more music, post-fall. Mainly, she worried her fall would distract from her creative output.
"I was nervous about music first and foremost," she explained. "And we wanted things to be about the song that night [of the ACM Awards], just kind of tried to avoid doing other things beforehand just because I didn't want to talk about my accident the whole time."
Watch the full music video for "Cry Pretty," below.