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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

Months before The Champion opened Super Bowl LII in 2018, Mike Fisher kept an unreleased demo of Carrie Underwood’s song in his headphones throughout the 2017 NHL playoffs. Underwood wrote the track in early 2017 with Brett James and Chris DeStefano while watching her husband, then 37, captain the Nashville Predators. Away from the arena lights, she saw the daily cost of his nearly twenty years in the league as he woke at dawn with sore joints to train beside players in their twenties and absorbed heavy collisions on the ice to shield younger teammates. Fisher was the first person to hear the demo. During Nashville’s historic run to its first Stanley Cup Final that spring, he listened to his wife’s voice in the tunnel before every game. He even begged her to let him play the recording in the locker room for his teammates, though Underwood had to say no to honor her confidentiality agreement with the television network. When the finished song arrived on January 12, 2018, featuring rapper Ludacris, it went straight to No. 1 on iTunes in the United States and nine other countries. NBC used the track to open Super Bowl LII on February 4 and played it across its coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. For the official video and studio footage, Underwood included clips of Fisher sweating through workouts, taking hits in his yellow Predators jersey, and raising the Western Conference championship trophy alongside famous athletes from around the world. The Predators had fallen short in the final series of the 2017 season before Fisher’s retirement, leaving him without a Stanley Cup ring, yet Underwood used her biggest release of the year to show millions the man she already saw as a champion at home.

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When the Nashville Predators walked down the arena tunnel during the spring of 2017 for their first Stanley Cup Final run, team captain Mike Fisher had an unreleased demo of Carrie Underwood’s “The Champion” playing in his headphones. Months before the song opened Super Bowl LII for millions of television viewers, it belonged to a thirty-seven-year-old hockey center getting ready for one more shift on the ice.

The song had started earlier that year after NBC Sports and the *Sunday Night Football* production team asked Underwood to create a custom broadcast open for Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis. Rather than handing her a finished track, network executives gave Underwood creative control to write an original piece from the ground up.

She brought in longtime Nashville collaborators Brett James and Chris DeStefano, spending a couple of days together looking up classic movie locker-room speeches and coaching addresses to capture the feeling of an athlete preparing for a defining test. Alongside those film clips, Underwood had a daily real-life reference inside her own Tennessee home.

Throughout the 2016–2017 NHL season, she watched Fisher push through his seventeenth year in the league. Away from the Bridgestone Arena suites, she saw him wake at dawn with stiff joints to keep pace with teammates in their twenties and come home bruised from absorbing checks along the boards.

While building the arrangement with James and DeStefano, Underwood intentionally left an open musical section for a guest vocalist. After turning the rough track in to NBC, network producers were so impressed that they asked to expand its role beyond football and make it a centerpiece for their coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

Long before the track went to producer Jim Jonsin for final studio polishing, Underwood played the work-in-progress demo at home for her husband. Fisher immediately adopted the recording as his pregame routine throughout Nashville’s 2017 postseason run, listening to his wife’s vocal takes before stepping onto the rink.

As the eighth-seeded Predators swept Chicago and defeated St. Louis and Anaheim to claim the Western Conference title, Fisher asked Underwood if he could play the song over the locker-room speakers for the rest of the roster. Bound by strict broadcast secrecy with NBC, Underwood had to turn him down, telling him the track could not leave his personal headphones until the network premiered it.

To complete the open verse she and her co-writers had saved, Underwood reached out to Atlanta rapper Ludacris, feeling his delivery matched the scale of the chorus. After she sent him the recording, Ludacris wrote and recorded his own guest bars—including a section spelling out the title—and sent back the vocal stems that completed the master version.

Meanwhile, Nashville’s playoff run ended in a six-game loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins in June 2017, and Fisher announced his retirement that August without the championship ring he had chased since 1999. Five months later, on January 12, 2018, Underwood officially released “The Champion”.

The single went straight to number one on the iTunes Top Songs chart in the United States and nine other countries, holding the top spot through its debut week. On February 4, 2018, the filmed sequence opened NBC’s Super Bowl LII broadcast between the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots, sending the song back to number one for four straight days before carrying into the network’s Winter Olympics broadcasts.

For the lyric video in January and the official music video released on March 2, 2018, Underwood made sure Fisher’s career stood at the center of the visuals. Alongside clips of surfer Bethany Hamilton, everyday workers, and historic civil rights footage, the videos included Fisher training, taking hits in his gold Predators sweater, and hoisting the Western Conference trophy.

By the very day that official video premiered on March 2, Fisher had decided to come out of retirement to suit up against the Vancouver Canucks for one final playoff push with Nashville. Later included as a bonus track on Underwood’s September 2018 album *Cry Pretty* and certified platinum by the RIAA in February 2019, the anthem that millions heard on Super Bowl Sunday never lost its first audience of one walking down the Bridgestone Arena tunnel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJgoHgpsb9I

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By 2016, Carrie Underwood already held seven Grammy Awards, yet she stepped onto the Nashville set of Forever Country feeling like a nervous student among her childhood heroes. Producer Shane McAnally had gathered 30 CMA Award winners that September to mark the 50th anniversary of the CMA Awards. Together, they recorded an ambitious mashup weaving John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” into a single track. Across a three-day shoot in Nashville directed by Joseph Kahn, contemporary stars like Underwood, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert, and Luke Bryan shared the studio with George Strait, Reba McEntire, Alan Jackson, Vince Gill, Alabama, and Brooks & Dunn. Instead of retreating to a private dressing room, Underwood lingered on set to listen to stories from the older pioneers and stood alongside Randy Travis, whose quiet smile among his peers three years after a life-threatening stroke deeply moved her. McAnally trusted Underwood to anchor several key transitions and carry the song’s final vocal climax. Even after selling tens of millions of records of her own, she admitted feeling nervous in the booth knowing she had to sing the high notes of Parton’s classic on a recording where Parton herself would appear. In the finished video, Underwood stands in a field of sunflowers delivering that soaring buildup before yielding the frame for Parton to close the song. Released in September 2016, “Forever Country” debuted straight at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, only the third song since 1990 to do so, and won CMA Music Video of the Year. Beyond the chart history, those three days in Nashville preserved one last gathering with Charley Pride and the pioneers who built the genre, giving Underwood the chance to honor her heroes while they were still in the room to hear it.

Growing up on an Oklahoma cattle farm, Carrie Underwood stopped eating beef at age 13 after listening to mother cows cry for their calves outside her bedroom window. In the small town of Checotah, her father, Stephen Underwood, worked at a local sawmill while her mother, Carole, taught elementary school. To help support the family, they raised beef cattle on their land, where young Carrie spent her afternoons after school naming and petting the newborn calves in the pasture. That childhood view of the farm changed in 1996 when she turned 13. For the first time, she understood the hard reality of the family business as the young bull calves were castrated, taken from their mothers, and loaded onto trucks for the auction yards. Long after the trucks rolled away, the mother cows stood by the wooden fence for days, calling out hoarsely from early morning into the night. Hearing those cries through her bedroom window left Carrie in tears, and at the dinner table, she could not look at her plate without picturing the calves she had raised as friends. She told her parents she would never eat beef from their farm or anywhere else again. In rural 1990s Oklahoma, where cattle helped pay the bills and beef sat at the center of almost every meal, Stephen and Carole never scolded their youngest daughter. Her father quietly accepted her decision, and her mother cooked separate meatless meals for Carrie throughout the rest of her years at home. That teenage promise turned into a lifelong vegetarian path. Decades later, Underwood brought that same care back to Checotah through her C.A.T.S. Foundation, supporting her hometown animal shelter while rescuing stray dogs of her own.

When Mike Fisher announced his retirement on August 3, 2017, Carrie Underwood felt both pride in his career and quiet relief that he was finally coming home safe. At 37, the Nashville Predators captain published a farewell letter in The Tennessean, stepping away after 17 NHL seasons and 1,088 games split between the Ottawa Senators and Nashville. His decision came just weeks after he led the Predators to the first Stanley Cup Final in franchise history. Fisher had arrived in Tennessee in 2011, leaving Ottawa after more than a decade in Canada just months after marrying Underwood in 2010 so they could build a home together in Nashville. Nearly twenty years of playing center had taken a heavy physical toll. He played through a broken foot, a dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs, torn cartilage, and nights where team doctors stitched his face in the locker room between periods so he could return to the ice. Fans saw a country star cheering from a suite at Bridgestone Arena, while Underwood spent years holding her breath whenever Fisher stayed down for a few seconds after a collision against the boards. When the arena lights went out, she was the one watching him wake up with chronic joint pain and fresh scars after months on the road. Sharing a photo of her husband on the ice that August afternoon, Underwood praised the integrity and faith he carried from the locker room to his quiet visits at Nashville children’s hospitals. She also admitted how grateful she was to no longer share him with the physical risks of the sport. Stepping off the ice meant closing a childhood dream that began on frozen ponds in Ontario, while giving Fisher his evenings back outside Nashville with Underwood and their two-year-old son, Isaiah, as the family began their next chapter under one roof.

Travis Tritt built his early career on a strict rule never to wear a cowboy hat, until the night Waylon Jennings placed his own black hat on his head. When Tritt arrived in Nashville in the late 1980s and early 1990s, industry traditionalists kept their distance from his long hair, leather clothes, and Southern rock edge. Refusing to dress like the commercial hat acts of the era left him isolated, until Jennings stepped forward to defend him in public and call him the true future of country music. Jennings recognized the same lonely fight he had faced against Nashville studio control in the 1970s. Having paid a heavy price during his own wild years on the road, the older outlaw sat with Tritt in quiet dressing rooms, warning him how to survive sudden fame and the temptations of touring. During a shared concert in front of thousands of fans, Jennings took off his signature black hat and set it on the younger singer. Tritt bowed his head and wore it, accepting the trust of the man who had stood up for him. That bond made February 13, 2002, hit hard when Jennings died at age 64 from complications of diabetes. At the memorial service inside Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, Tritt and Hank Williams Jr. stood together with red eyes, holding hands and talking through their memories of the mentor who had treated them both like sons. Tritt later stepped into the wooden circle at the Grand Ole Opry beside Marty Stuart to perform “Outlaw’s Reward” in Jennings’ honor, his voice catching as they sang for their friend. More than two decades later, Tritt still speaks Waylon Jennings’ name at nearly every show, keeping his mentor’s memory alive on the stages he helped him reach.

By the early 1990s, Travis Tritt had told reporters he would never marry again, convinced after two divorces in his twenties that he was built for the road alone. Those doubts came from two early heartbreaks. His first marriage to high school sweetheart Karen Ryon in 1982 began when he was 19 and ended two years later under money troubles and family opposition to his music. A second marriage to Jodi Barnett, who was 12 years older, ended in 1989 right as he signed his first major deal with Warner Bros. Walking out of divorce court just as his records began selling in the millions left a quiet sting. He could hold the attention of thousands under arena lights, yet he felt powerless to keep a home together. The leather jackets, motorcycles, and rowdy outlaw image soon became armor for a man who did not want to be left again. That changed when he met Theresa Nelson, a soft-spoken college student and model who cared about James Travis Tritt rather than the platinum plaques on his wall. Instead of rushing, they dated quietly for years between heavy touring schedules until he felt safe coming home from the road. Taking back a public vow meant swallowing his pride in front of the country music press, though the fear of losing Theresa had grown larger than the fear of another heartbreak. On April 12, 1997, at age 34, Tritt stood at the altar in his hometown of Marietta, Georgia, fighting back tears as Theresa walked down the aisle. That afternoon in Georgia closed the chapter on his years as a solitary rebel. Nearly three decades later, he and Theresa are still together at home in Georgia, after raising their daughter, Tyler Reese, and their two sons, Tristan and Tarian.

On June 2, 2011, Shania Twain received the 2,442nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, yet her thoughts at the podium stayed with the parents who never saw her name on a record cover. Introduced by actress Bo Derek at 6270 Hollywood Boulevard, the Canadian singer accepted the Recording category honor at a turning point in her life. She was emerging from her 2008 divorce from producer Robert “Mutt” Lange and years of vocal dysphonia tied to Lyme disease and emotional strain, a condition that had kept her off the stage before her eventual 2012 return in Las Vegas. Watching from the crowd was her new husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, whom she had married on New Year’s Day 2011. When Twain stepped up to speak, her voice broke as she remembered her mother, Sharon, and her stepfather, Jerry Twain. Growing up poor in the northern mining town of Timmins, Ontario, she sometimes went to school hungry, and her mother scraped together gas money on freezing winter nights to drive an eight-year-old Shania to sing late sets in local bars. On November 1, 1987, Sharon and Jerry died in a car accident in Ontario. At 22, still known as Eileen Twain, she put her early music ambitions on hold and took a stage job at Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville to raise her three younger siblings, Mark, Darryl, and Carrie-Ann. Calling her path from northern Canada to Hollywood a small miracle, she told the crowd how proud her mother would have been to witness the day. As she knelt to touch the brass star bearing the Ojibwe name she later adopted in honor of Jerry Twain, the family history that began in the woods of Ontario remained right there on the pavement beside her.

The first song cousins Wil and Langdon Reid ever wrote together did not stay in a bedroom notebook in Staunton, Virginia, because their fathers decided to take it into the studio with The Statler Brothers. Wil, the son of bass singer Harold Reid, and Langdon, the son of lead singer and songwriter Don Reid, grew up beside stage curtains and on long-distance tour buses. Long before they picked up guitars of their own, four-part gospel and country harmonies were the everyday sound of family life. When the cousins began teaching themselves to write songs, their first effort was a track called “What We Love To Do.” Harold and Don heard enough honesty in that early tune to record it with The Statler Brothers, placing their sons’ first songwriting attempt directly into the group’s official catalog. The cousins started performing as Grandstaff before renaming their duo Wilson Fairchild, a combination of their two middle names. Carrying the Reid surname meant constant comparison to one of country music’s most decorated vocal groups, yet Wil and Langdon never ran from their fathers’ history. They built their own career around traditional country storytelling while keeping the Statler songbook alive on stage. In 2008, six years after The Statler Brothers retired from touring, the legendary quartet was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. With the older generation seated in the room, Wil and Langdon stepped onto the stage to sing in honor of their fathers and fellow members Phil Balsley and Jimmy Fortune. That family circle grew heavier after Harold Reid passed away in 2020, leaving audiences to catch glimpses of his warm humor whenever Wil steps up to the microphone. Today, a third generation including Jack and Davis Reid continues to play and sing, keeping the harmonies that began in Staunton moving through the same bloodline.

In 1993, after Nashville labels and country radio had written him off, 61-year-old Johnny Cash rebuilt his career in a Los Angeles living room with a hip-hop and heavy metal producer. Dropped by Columbia Records in 1986 after 28 years and struggling through a quiet run at Mercury Records, Cash spent the early 1990s playing dinner theaters and county fairs while country stations favored younger singers. Backstage after a show at California’s Rhythm Cafe, Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin, known for working with Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys, and Slayer, approached him about making a record. Cash doubted that any label still knew what to do with an aging singer whose recent Nashville tracks had been buried under glossy arrangements. With encouragement from his wife, June Carter Cash, he accepted Rubin’s invitation to skip the big studios altogether. Sitting in Rubin’s Los Angeles living room and later at Cash’s cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee, he recorded with only a single microphone and his Martin acoustic guitar. Across weeks of quiet sessions, he pulled hundreds of gospel hymns, prison ballads, cowboy songs, and new originals from memory, including old folk songs his mother once sang in the Arkansas cotton fields. To introduce the music, Rubin booked him at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room on the Sunset Strip in December 1993, followed by the Glastonbury Festival in 1994, where young rock and punk crowds stood transfixed by a 62-year-old man in black holding an acoustic guitar. Released on April 26, 1994, American Recordings earned Cash the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album and launched a six-album series. Over the final decade of his life, especially after June died in 2003, those daily recording sessions with Rubin kept him singing until the end.

On September 1, 1970, Barry Gibb turned 24 at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge, London, by marrying the Scottish woman he had met backstage nearly three years earlier. They first crossed paths on December 21, 1967, during the filming of a Top of the Pops Christmas special at the BBC studios in London. Barry was 21 and the Bee Gees were breaking through across Britain, while 18-year-old Linda Gray, a former Miss Edinburgh, was working at the studio as an assistant and co-host. Surrounded by screaming fans, the young singer still found himself nervous in the corridor, looking for any excuse to speak with her and get her contact details before taping ended. After his brief first marriage to Maureen Bates ended and nearly three years of relentless touring passed, Barry married Linda on his 24th birthday, turning every September 1 into a double celebration. Linda quietly stepped back from her own modeling and television prospects in London to build a home life away from the industry. Before disco revived the band in 1975, the couple lived through the lean early 1970s when the Bee Gees played small clubs in northern England. They eventually raised five children, Stephen, Ashley, Travis, Michael, and Alexandra, welcomed seven grandchildren, and kept homes in Miami and the English countryside where Barry’s brothers and parents regularly gathered. As the decades took Andy in 1988, Maurice in 2003, and Robin in 2012, Barry retreated into his house and stopped picking up his guitar. It was Linda who urged the last surviving Gibb brother to sing again and take the stage to honor them. When Barry received his knighthood at Buckingham Palace in 2018, he arrived the same way he had walked out of that London church in 1970, holding the hand of the woman from the BBC hallway over 55 years ago.