Carrie Underwood - ELLE Magazine

Carrie Underwood in the cover of ELLE Magazine.

Carrie you're so pretty!

THE GIRL IN THE FANTASTIC BUBBLE (ELLE Magazine)

Carrie Underwood always sleeps with the bathroom light on in her hotel room everywhere she goes because often she wakes up in the middle of the night having no idea where she is, and no one is there to tell her. She’s been on the road since February supporting her double-platinum sophomore album, Carni­val Ride, traveling by bus almost every day, hitting the stage most nights at another big arena in another middlesize city, and is scheduled to play about 140 gigs by the end of this year.

Such is the bubble Underwood is living in—a weird, often lonely, train-whistle-in-the-distance kind of place. Try dating, for example. “It’s awkward,” she confides. “You can’t go out on a date like a normal person. There are a lot of phones involved.” She laughs. “That can be either a good thing or a bad thing because you get to know ’em before you go out with ’em, but then you only see each other maybe once a month, maybe twice. As if dating weren’t awkward enough. And I don’t know the rules…. I’m still learning!”