How does she do it?
Carrie Underwood is now in her 13th season of serving as the face of Sunday Night Football on NBC with her “Waiting All On Sunday Night” theme song.
The American Idol alum began performing the Sunday Night Football theme song back in 2013, and in 2016 debuted the “Oh, Sunday Night” theme song, which was a spinoff of her 2016 duet with Miranda Lambert, “Somethin’ Bad.”
Then in 2018, Carrie debuted another new theme song, “Game On,” which she co-wrote with Brett James and Chris DeStefano. However that song resulted in a copyright lawsuit and Sunday Night Football reverted back to the original theme song, “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night,” which was adapted from Joan Jett’s 1988 hit “I Hate Myself for Loving You.”
This season was once again filmed at The Resorts World Theater, where Carrie’s Las Vegas REFLECTION residency took place, and as is the norm with the SNF opener, the video itself always looks a bit different each weekend depending on the game’s location and what the matchup is. The lyrics also change slightly each week depending on the teams featured.
That often leaves fans wondering: How does Carrie Underwood record a new Sunday Night Football intro every week of the NFL season, including the playoffs?
As it turns out, the intro for each week is filmed before the season begins.
Carrie recently joined Highway Mornings with Cody Alan on SiriusXM’s The Highway, where she revealed just how much goes into making the intro videos:
“Well it’s all spread out. So we’ll go in and we’ll record the base track first. And we always try to kind of refresh it a little bit every year. So we’ll work on it and it’s the same basic, the same bones, but we always try to do little things that are a little bit different.
And then we’ll go and film it, and that usually takes a day of my time. They go around and they, you know, might depending on what the theme of it is, they might talk to other players or film other intros of other players and go to different cities and stuff like that.
And then they cut it all together and then I go back into the studio and I will record like every combination because they’ll know what their lineup is gonna be for Sunday nights.”
Of course that works for the 18 games in the regular season, when the Sunday Night Football schedule is set before the season kicks off. But what about the playoffs, when we don’t know what the matchups are going to be until the end of the season? Well according to Carrie, she records alternate versions for every possible matchup:
“But then once we get into playoffs, it’s like we don’t know what’s gonna happen. So first I do all of the Sunday night schedule and then I do any combination of anybody that could ever possibly play each other in the playoffs.”
It’s no doubt a ton of work making all those possible combinations in addition to the 18 versions for the regular season, but how much does Carrie Underwood make for lending her voice to Sunday nights? Well despite rumors that she was paid $1 million per week, Carrie previously revealed that it’s actually “pretty pro bono.”
Even if she’s not getting a cool $18 million, it sounds like Carrie is happy just getting to serve as the kickoff to Sunday nights in millions of homes across America.
