Carrie Underwood Turned Down Florida Georgia Line Collaboration

Oh you’ve got to love this.

So back in February during the annual Country Radio Seminar conference in Nashville, Carrie Underwood was asked a question about the challenges women face in country music, and she expressed some frustration about her trouble finding good songs to record.

“It’s hard for me to find demos. It’s hard for me to find songs. Because songwriters aren’t writing for women. Why would they? I mean, that’s their job. That’s what they’re going to do every day. They’ve gotta pay their mortgage. Put their kids through college. They’re giving the consumers what they want, which is dude songs.”

Carrie’s comments probably deserve their own dissertation and examination, but it speaks to the frustrations women in the mainstream country industry face, and how that problem is a nuanced one, including how it’s marketplace appeal for “dude songs” that is contributing to this difficulty for women. Yes, it’s easy to say, “Well just write your own songs Carrie,” and that’s probably a fair suggestion. But not every performer is a great songwriter, including big ones like George Strait.

But the aftermath of Carrie’s comments is where the story gets good. So after numerous publications went to print with Underwood’s statements, Florida Georgia Line decided they would step up to offer help (or exploit the publicity) by reaching out to Carrie with a proposition. And instead of going through back channels as would be the norm, they did it publicly through their social media channels.

“Whether you know it or not, we are huge fans of you and we have always wanted to do a song with you we’ve just been waiting on the right one,” the duo said. “We’d really love for Carrie Underwood to hear this song. We think it would be a massive collaboration. We’d love to send it to you. We don’t have your email or your phone number, so we’re just gonna play a little.”

But of course, this homage was just a front for making a public spectacle of their offer to “help” Carrie Underwood with a collaboration so they could siphon off some publicity from the situation for themselves. The song the duo played a snippet of appeared to have the title of “Feels Good.”

But apparently Carrie Underwood was not feeling good about any of it. Underwood never replied or even addressed the Florida Georgia Line proposal publicly, which left many speculating if Carrie had snubbed the Bro-Country duo.

Well, while recently speaking to Cody Alan of the CMT Hot 20 Countdown, the duo confirmed that Carrie Underwood had indeed given them the Heisman on their collaboration idea.

“We got turned down on that one,” Tyler Hubbard confirmed to Cody Alan. “You don’t win ’em all. I guess she didn’t love it as much as we did, but that’s alright.”

Brian Kelly of the group tried to save face by saying, “I think she said she’d love to and it was amazing, but it was right around her book tour release so she was super busy, and didn’t really have time.”

But Tyler Hubbard butted in, saying, “We got turned down. We got turned down Cody.”

Hey, hats off to Florida Georgia Line if they really were trying to help. But their derivative style of Bro-Country is exactly what has put country women in a precarious position in the the mainstream. That said, there has been a spike in successful songs by women recently, though mostly of the pop variety like “The Bones” by Maren Morris, and Gabby Barrett’s “I Hope”—both of which went #1 on radio. Ingrid Andress and “More Hearts Than Mine” is about the only one that deserved a #1, but only received it on the MediaBase chart, not Billboard.

Either way, good on Carrie Underwood for not feeling like she needed to accept help from Florida Georgia Line for attention.

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