"Before He Cheats"
Key the truck, carve your name in the seats, take a Louisville Slugger to the headlights. Carrie Underwood's revenge anthem crossed over from country radio to everywhere in 2006–07, spent 64 straight weeks on the Hot 100, and became — for a time — the best-selling country song, period.
Carrie Underwood won the fourth season of American Idol in 2005 and released her debut album Some Hearts that same year. Written by Chris Tompkins and Josh Kear, "Before He Cheats" arrived as the album's fourth single in August 2006 — a vivid revenge fantasy in which the narrator, picturing her maybe-cheating partner flirting in a bar, keys his truck, carves her name into the leather seats, smashes both headlights with a Louisville Slugger, and slashes all four tires, all so that next time he'll "think before he cheats."
The crossover was seismic. The song spent five straight weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs, then kept climbing pop charts long after country radio moved on: it reached No. 8 on the Hot 100 and logged 64 consecutive weeks on that chart, one of the longest runs in Hot 100 history. Its 38-week climb into the top 10 set a record that stood for 14 years. At the 2008 Grammys it won Best Female Country Vocal Performance for Underwood and Best Country Song for its writers, after being named the CMA's 2007 Single of the Year.
It became the first country song to sell over two million digital copies and, for a time, the best-selling country song of all time — and it remains Underwood's biggest-selling single, holding the record for the best-selling single by any American Idol contestant for years. The Roman White-directed video — Underwood strutting from the wrecked truck, hair in the wind, lights exploding behind her in homage to the 1976 film Carrie — made the Louisville Slugger a permanent piece of pop-culture shorthand: the patron song of the wronged and the warning shot heard at every karaoke night since.
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