Carrie Underwood‘s latest album, Play On, is hot on the charts…and as fans have been enjoying hits like the chart-topping “Cowboy Casanova” and her gorgeous new single, “Temporary Home,” they’re not only hearing more of Carrie’s songwriting — with Carrie co-writing seven of the 13 songs on Play On — but they’re also witnessing Carrie’s growth as a person and an artist. She was 22 years old when her first album, Some Hearts, was released, and Carrie says that these last few years have coincided with what she considers to be “a huge figuring-out-who-you-are-as-a-person time in anybody’s life.” (AUDIO INFO BELOW)

• Congratulations to Carrie, who was named Favorite Country Artist at Wednesday night’s People’s Choice Awards!
• And be watching for Carrie in an upcoming guest appearance on the CBS hit series, How I Met Your Mother. The special one-off role will find Carrie portraying a love interest for series star Josh Radnor. The episode will tape later this month to air in March.

  Carrie Underwood says that her new album reflects more of her through her songwriting, and that her albums have been “growing up” along with her. (:51)
“I think just as a writer I’ve been able to put more of myself in my songs. And I think just growing up as a person, I feel like these three albums that I’ve done have been done where a person would change the most about themselves in that time period, from, you know, 22 to 26. That’s a huge figuring-out-who-you-are-as-a-person time in anybody’s life. So I would like to think that my albums do reflect that. I feel like Carnival Ride was a step…opening a little more of the book to the public, and I definitely feel like Play On is an album that people can see more layers of the onion, so to speak, and they can see more pages in my book.”