Shania Twain best songs revealed

SHANIA TWAIN has one good album and was never really country, though the singer had a very successful few years and made a pop career for herself out of “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” or “That Don’t Impress Me Much,

Shania Twain is a Canadian country pop singer-songwriter and actress. She is known for her successful albums such as “The Woman in Me” (1995) and “Come On Over” (1997), which became the best-selling country album of all time by a female artist, as well as her hit songs like “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”, “That Don’t Impress Me Much”, and “You’re Still the One”. Twain has sold over 100 million records, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

The star said “It’s such a rocky track but with a country stomp, a true hybrid song, and it had all the attitude that I would continue to put into the music I was writing”.

I wanted “Any Man of Mine” to be the first single from The Woman in Me, because to me that was really coming in, kicking the door down and saying, ‘This is a new sound for the genre,’ and I was excited about it. Shanie said she was putting her foot down, putting all that sass into the lyrics”, adding “I guess you could say that I sort of stamped a quintessential Shania mark on it”.

“You write them and you live them in that moment. Then, you let them go,” she says. But with a new album and tour, the music-industry “auntie” still has a lot to give.

That’s why we ended up going with “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under” as the first single, because it’s a more typically country song. We wanted to sort of ease people in to “Any Man of Mine”.

On her music her team were putting a rock edge to her country songs, and she was confident that going in this direction was really where she belonged.

Even playing the songs to my label head was hard. I didn’t know what he was going to think because it was so very, very different. It was a unique stance that was nowhere in country at that moment. I thought maybe I might even get dropped from the label. I mean, what if they didn’t know what to do with these songs, or where they might fit?

So I was very lucky to have the label that I did, and we were at least able to get it to radio meekly. Very meekly. Because it was a struggle, I’m telling you! Those faces I got when I was visiting those radio stations! It was tough.

I mean, some of them were very polite. They would say, ‘Wow, it really sounds great but we could never play it. There’s no way our fans are gonna want to listen to this.’ Then a little bit later they’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll play it one time and if we get callbacks we’ll go from there, otherwise you’re on your own.’

Thankfully, the fans did call back. They loved the song, and it was almost like it became this instant success once that little trickle of airplay began.

Shania Twain’s 5 best songs ever, ranked

1. You’re Still the One
2. Man! I Feel Like a Woman
3. From This Moment On
4. That Don’t Impress Me Much
5. Any Man of Mine

Last album

Queen of Me, Twain’s first full album since 2017’s Now. Fans got a taste of that voice in Las Vegas with her two residencies, “Shania: Still the One” at Caesar’s Palace in 2012 and “Let’s Go!” at Planet Hollywood in 2021. The first residency marked her return to performing live after a decade-long hiatus.

“It’s easier for me to make loud sounds than it is to make soft sounds,” she says of the shift and how she adapted to the changes, which include Gore-Tex rods to stabilize her throat from what she called “flanging” and a lack of control. “When the air is dry, it’s harder to get that resonance. When I’m loud, it happens, which was the opposite problem before I got the surgery.”

The Vegas set lists included her greatest hits, spanning three decades in the business. Those songs were the catalyst for something else most people would consider hard. Robert John “Mutt” Lange, Twain’s ex-husband, produced many of her most popular tracks. Performing love songs like “Forever and for Always” and “From This Moment On” night after night, with their connection to that particular relationship, isn’t something anyone would consider easy.

On songwriting

Twain admits that while the world was locked down and she was recovering from a tough bout with COVID, she was busy writing, even humbly bragging that she’d written enough material for “four or five albums.”

“I was writing all these songs in my pajamas,” she laughs. But when the mention of her surgery and the maybe-ephemeral nature of her current voice comes up, she’s reminded that she could lose it again. Twain doesn’t shy away from the fact that she was writing so much because she may be on borrowed time.

It’s so true. It was nonstop, definitely. To some people in the industry, I was manufactured for sure. And I think it was only recently, after the documentary, that a lot of people actually realised that wasn’t true and that the record was way overdue to be set straight.

At the time, while all that was happening, I didn’t waste my time to try and change people’s minds. It just felt like a waste of energy and effort. I wanted to be focused on the music. I had so much work to do. I didn’t want to spend my interview time defending myself. I wanted to talk about the music, about creativity, and about what was next.

I tried to just avoid those questions and move on from them, to be honest. To just let them roll of my back. It felt like it would bog me down otherwise, because it was pretty relentless. I’m not really sure why I didn’t take it personally. I guess just because I knew it wasn’t the truth.