Carrie Underwood has achieved stratospheric success since winning “American Idol,” but she still wants to check off some career bucket list items. Underwood shares her top three career highlights and says Guns N’ Roses tops her dream tour list.
Carrie Underwood on Top 3 Career Moments & Her Dream Tour
During a July 2025 interview with SiriusXM’s Cody Alan, Underwood named “winning ‘American Idol'” as the top of her list of career moments. The singer’s season 4 win launched her career, so it’s not surprising that’s her number 1 pick.
The country star said “becoming a Grand Ole Opry member” was next, and rounded out her top 3 with “being at Stagecoach [Festival] and getting to call Axl Rose out on stage.”
“It was something that I had been hoping for forever,” Underwood added.
The “American Idol” alum is a loyal GN’R fan who also opened for the band several times in 2023.
When asked who is on her bucket list to record with, she said, “I’ve gotten to sing with them, but I would love to record something with Guns N’ Roses. That would be really cool.”
She was also asked, “If you could go on tour with one band, who would that be?” Underwood answered with a grin, “Who do you think?”
Carrie Underwood Is a Lifelong Guns N’ Roses Fan
In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Underwood shared what it was like to share the stage with Axl Rose to sing “Paradise City” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” at Stagecoach.
“I’ve been covering Guns N’ Roses my whole life, pretty much, and definitely onstage for the past 15 years at least,” Underwood said at the time.
She continued, “I had asked before if he would ever come sing, or if I could come to him somewhere. We had a couple almost maybes, where it almost maybe would have happened but for various reasons it wasn’t the right time.”
Underwood sent Rose an email explaining “the why and what he meant to me” ahead of Stagecoach.
She explained, “The way I learned how to sing was I would pick really hard vocalists to try to emulate, and [Rose’s] voice always mesmerized me. I was like, ‘How is he doing the things that he’s doing?’ So I told him all that … and he came!”
Underwood added, “We had rehearsals and everything went very smoothly. It was easy for all of us to be around each other. Hopefully, he had a good time.”
In May 2023, Underwood told Howard Stern, “I’ve been a fan [of GN’R] since almost birth.”
Of Rose, she noted, “His voice is something that just cut through the air to me … he didn’t sound like everybody else and sometimes it wasn’t pretty [because] that’s not what the song was meant for. He was willing to, you know, get into the song and do what the song needed.”
