Carrie Underwood is used to seeing crowds at the Ryman Auditorium. For three days in February, though, she had the former home of the Grand Ole Opry pretty much to herself, as she and a dozen Nashville songwriters worked on new tunes. "We just ruled the Ryman for a little bit," the 24-year-old singer says. "We kind of hung out there. We ate on the stage. We thought it would be a nice place to get inspiration from."

After the release of her 2005 debut, Some Hearts, which has sold nearly 6 million copies, Underwood committed to developing her songwriting skills for her new album, Carnival Ride, out Tuesday. "I'm the kind of person that, if I got in there and wrote and it was bad, I'd be, like, 'I'm not a writer; I'll let the professionals handle this,' " she says. "But it was something I definitely wanted to see if I could do."

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The three-day retreat at the Ryman offered Underwood such a pause. In a place where Hank Williams and Patsy Cline once sang, where Johnny Cash taped his ABC variety show, Underwood got to write with such top tunesmiths as Craig Wiseman, whose credits include Tim McGraw's Live Like You Were Dying.

"The goals were twofold," says retreat organizer Chris Oglesby, who runs OWM/19 Entertainment, the Nashville office of the company that manages Underwood's career. "One was to continue to get Carrie more comfortable writing and writing with different writers. The other was to create an environment where we could build some camaraderie, as well as find some great songs to put on a record."