Lauren Alaina: From “drowning in [her] emotions” to ‘Sitting Pretty on Top of the World’

Mercury Nashville

Lauren Alaina may now be Sitting Pretty on Top of the World, as the title of her third album suggests — but that wasn’t always the case. 

In fact, she candidly admits the title track was inspired by her struggles over the last few years.

“The chorus says ‘life of the party,'” she explains, “and I’ve always been the life of the party. And the last few years have had quite a few upsets. I lost two pretty significant relationships very publicly, and lost my step dad, and then this pandemic. And they were just a lot of things that had kind of happened in the whole time.”

“I was on Dancing with the Stars, I was on tour,” she continues. “I was the girl that makes everybody smile and laugh. And I was oftentimes kind of drowning in my emotions. Everybody saw me on stage, but behind the curtain, I was struggling.”

Eventually, “On Top of the World,” would come to mean even more to Lauren.

“I wrote that song about that, and it felt really representative of the rest of the songs,” she says. “And then the title now for me is just really empowering-sounding.”

“And I’ve found so much healing and I’ve gotten myself into such a great place emotionally that that title feels really representative of how I feel now,” she adds.

Sitting Pretty on Top of the World features Lauren’s latest hit with Jon Pardi“Getting Over Him.” September 11, she stars in the new Hallmark Channel movie Roadhouse Romance, ahead of the arrival of her new book, Getting Good at Being You, in November.

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