Shania Twain

Shania Twain: The Bare Midriff That Broke Nashville

Steve Earle, who was not being kind, once called her "the world's highest-paid lap-dancer." Nashville's establishment nicknamed her navel "the most famous midriff in country music." Country Music Television banned the video for her first single. Then *Come On Over* sold more than forty million copies, becoming the best-selling studio album ever released by a female solo artist in any genre and the best-selling country album in history, and the argument was over.

Timmins, and the Sandwich

She was born Eilleen Regina Edwards on August 28, 1965, in Windsor, Ontario, to Sharon Morrison and Clarence Edwards, a railway engineer. Her parents divorced when she was two. Her mother moved to Timmins in northern Ontario and remarried Jerry Twain, an Ojibwe man from the Mattagami First Nation who legally adopted Eilleen and her sister Jill. The household was poor in a way she has described without decoration: food was often scarce, and school lunch was sometimes a "poor man's sandwich." She witnessed her adoptive father's violence toward her mother, and her mother's depression.

She was singing by three, playing guitar at eight, writing songs at ten. At eight she was also being taken into bars after closing time to perform, earning about twenty Canadian dollars for a set between midnight and one in the morning. She appeared on the CBC's *Tommy Hunter Show* at thirteen and traded housecleaning for singing lessons with a Toronto coach. In 1984 a Toronto DJ, Stan Campbell, noted her "powerful voice with an impressive range."

November 1, 1987

Sharon and Jerry Twain were killed in a car crash roughly fifty kilometres north of Wawa, Ontario. Eilleen was twenty-two. She went back to Timmins, took responsibility for her younger siblings, and eventually relocated the household to Huntsville, where she took a job in the resort revue at Deerhurst — five nights a week of Broadway medleys and Vegas-style production numbers. It was not the career she wanted. It paid for the family, and it taught her stagecraft that no honky-tonk apprenticeship would have.

Mercury, and the Name

A demo reached Nashville; Mercury Nashville signed her in the early 1990s. She changed her professional name to Shania, a choice she has connected to her adoptive father's Ojibwe heritage — some accounts render it as "I'm on my way," though the etymology remains disputed. Her self-titled 1993 debut reached number 67 on the U.S. country albums chart and initially flopped, and she disliked it: she had no creative control and co-wrote exactly one track. It later went platinum anyway, and it did something more important — the producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange heard her original songs and offered to collaborate. They met at Nashville's Fan Fair in June 1993 and married that December 28.

The Two Albums

*The Woman in Me* (1995) was co-written by Twain and Lange almost in its entirety and produced four country number ones, including "Any Man of Mine." It sold twelve million copies in the United States and took the Grammy for Best Country Album. *Come On Over* (1997) was the event. Twelve of its sixteen tracks became singles. "You're Still the One," "From This Moment On," "That Don't Impress Me Much" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" ran for years. Remixed for Europe, it spent eleven weeks at number one in Britain and sold nearly four million copies there. It set a Billboard 200 record with ninety-nine weeks in the top twenty and has sold more than forty million worldwide.

*Up!* (2002) arrived as three discs of the same songs in country, pop and world-dance arrangements, debuted at number one with 874,000 first-week sales, and made her the only female artist in history with three consecutive Diamond-certified albums. Career sales exceed 100 million records, making her the best-selling female artist in country music history, with $421.1 million grossed on the road.

The Silence

Twain was diagnosed with Lyme disease and with dysphonia — a disorder that destabilized the muscles controlling her voice. In 2008 her marriage ended after Lange's affair with her close friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud; the divorce was finalized in 2010. She subsequently married Frédéric Thiébaud, Marie-Anne's former husband, on January 1, 2011. The hiatus lasted from 2004 until a Caesars Palace residency announcement in 2011. In 2018 she underwent a laryngoplasty in which Gore-Tex stabilizers were implanted in her throat to reduce the load on her vocal muscles. *Now* (2017), her first album written without Lange, debuted at number one: "I needed to do it alone," she said, "to start ideas and finish them without relying on anybody else's opinion and direction." *Queen of Me* (2023) put her alongside Madonna as the only women with new Billboard 200 top tens in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s.

Why Shania Is Called a Genius

The claim here rests on craft, specifically songwriting craft, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. Twain writes hooks. The Academy of Country Music gave her its Poet's Award in August 2022, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame inducted her in October 2022, and she holds thirty-nine BMI songwriter awards. Lange, who had constructed some of the highest-grossing rock records ever made, described her "distinctive voice as a songwriter" as the reason he called her at all.

The specific skill is structural. She writes conversational first lines that function as titles — "That don't impress me much," "Any man of mine" — and builds a chorus that resolves the sentence. She isolates herself to write, and converts unhappy material into up-tempo songs, a technical decision as much as an emotional one.

The counter-case has three parts, none trivial. First, the peak was collaborative: Lange co-wrote and produced everything on the two records that made her, and separating her contribution from his is impossible from outside. Second, the innovation was as much marketing as music — she was the first country artist to fully exploit MTV, cultivating a video-driven image that reached pop audiences largely without touring. Third, her voice, a warm contralto, is pleasant rather than extraordinary, and after Lyme disease it needed surgical hardware to function. What she has is an unerring ear for the phrase an audience will repeat. That is a rare gift. It is not intellectual genius, and inflating it does her no favors.

Legacy

Twain made country-pop crossover a genre rather than a compromise, and Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood and Harry Styles have all named her as the reason it was available to them. She also demonstrated, in front of an industry that told her both men and women would reject it, that a country woman could be sexually self-possessed and sell forty million records anyway.

Achievements

• Officer of the Order of Canada — 2005
• Grammy Award for Best Country Album — 1995
• Grammy Award for Best Country Song — 1998
• Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance — 1998
• Instruments: guitar and voice
• Genres: pop music, rock music and dance music