“Carrie Underwood has been a huge influence on who I am,” Lauren Alaina tells The Hollywood Reporter. “She started out the same way I did, and she is someone that I look up to so much.”

So when Lauren was choosing songs for her debut album, Wildflower, which was just released, Lauren got excited when she saw “C. Underwood” listed as a co-writer for the song “Eighteeen Inches”—the distance between the heart and the head.

The song, Lauren tells USA Today, reminds her of one of her friends.

“She got married when she was 17, and she had a baby. And they moved here, to Nashville. Her husband's going to college and has a full-time job, and she stays at home with the baby, and she doesn’t know anyone here. She moved here to support him. That’s, like, the story of that song.”

Carrie has even offered to take Lauren on the road.

“I haven’t talked to her in a few months,” Lauren tells the Reporter. “I have her phone number, hopefully I’ll be seeing her pretty soon and maybe one day we’ll get to do something. I hope so.”