Carrie Underwood announces she's ready for a "Carnival Ride"

Underwood is preparing to release her new 19 Recordings/Arista Records/Arista Nashville disc Oct. 23.

The first single, "So Small," is a country airplay Top 10 after 4 weeks.

Underwood's publicist said Underwood found the title from a lyric on the new disc to be a "great metaphor."

Underwood said, "You step onto this ride called life, and it's a crazy thing you don't know anything about, but you get on it anyway. You do what you can to lean different directions to try and get it to go where you want it to go, but you can't stop it - it just keeps moving. That's why 'Carnival Ride' works as my album title because it describes the wonderful craziness that I've been through over the past couple years."

Underwood's debut disc, "Some Hearts," was released Nov. 15, 2005 and spent 27 weeks at number 1 on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart, holding that position across multiple weeks in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Currently six-times platinum, and with SoundScan sales in excess of 1.2 million copies this year, "Some Hearts" remains the best-selling country album of 2007.

The disc included number one songs "Jesus, Take the Wheel" and "Before He Cheats."