Billboard Women In Music 'Icon' ShaniaTwain on Her 'Triumphant' New Album & Fame After 50
When Eilleen Twainwas in 12th grade — not yet Shania, not yet a global star — hermusic teacher asked her to sing an original song at a high school concert in Ottawa,Ontario. Though she had been singing professionally since she was 8, often tohelp her parents pay the bills, performing made her so nervous, she could feelit in her bladder. When the MC called her name, she was sitting in the trumpetsection of her school orchestra and felt a warm trickle down her leg. Thinkingfast, she kicked over the glass of water next to her chair and said, “Damn! Ispilled my water!” Then she took center stage with her acoustic guitar andknocked ’em dead.
Shania Twain: Photos of the BillboardWomen In Music 'Icon' Award Winner
Every enduringlysuccessful artist has a survival instinct, but Shania Twain’s is in Joan of Arcterritory. Her impoverished childhood in Ontario, detailed in her best-sellingmemoir From This Moment On, reads like Dickens: parents who didn’t alwayshave money for groceries and moved the family from place to place, sometimes tododge the rent; five kids who would sleep in dirt-floored basements; a fatherwho would get into violent fights with her mother, who sank into chronicdepression. One of Twain’s first attempts at songwriting was titled “Won’t YouCome Out to Play” — a plea for her mother to get out of bed.
All that happened before her 22nd year, when Twain was living inToronto, trying to make it as a singer-songwriter, and got a call that herparents had been killed in a car accident. To support herself and her youngerbrothers (Twain has one older sister), she took a job in a Las Vegas-stylerevue in Huntsville, Ontario, where she lived in a cabin with no running waterand washed her clothes in a stream. “Music has been my greatest therapy,”reflects Twain, 51, today. “It always has been. It’s a very great friend.”
Mary Rozzi“Self-doubt cancreep into my thinking,” says Twain, “so when I prove something tomyself, it gives me a little more courage.” Twain wears a Karl Lagerfeldtop and Norma Kamali Collection pants from New York Vintage.
Her life, and luck,changed dramatically in the early ’90s, when she moved to Nashville and herclear, companionable voice got noticed. The rest is history: 35 million albumssold in the United States, according to Nielsen Music, the most of any femalecountry artist in the last 25 years. Four No. 1s on Billboard’s TopCountry Albums chart, and seven on Hot Country Songs. Five Grammys,six Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards. Plus, a smashalbum, Come On Over, that holds the record for the most weeks at No. 1on Top Country Albums, with 15.7 million copies sold in the United States,making it the best-selling album by a woman (or any solo artist) since Nielsenbegan tracking sales in 1991.
Nick Jonas Shares His 5 Favorite SongsFrom 'Lifetime Crush' Shania Twain
Equal parts grit andpluck, Twain was the ’90s crossover queen, straddling country and pop withinfectious hits that were upbeat and empowering. In songs like “You’re Stillthe One,” “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and “Honey, I’m Home,” Twain injectedcountry twang with rock’n’roll muscle and feminist bravado, casting herself asa self-reliant modern gal: fun-loving but ambitious, sensual but tough andunafraid to rhyme “stress” with “PMS.”
"Shania showed theentire music industry that there were new options for where you could take yourcareer in country music, how widely you could expandit," says Taylor Swift. "She incorporated so many elementsinto what she represented — she created fashion moments, she was sexy, you gotthe impression she would tell you exactly what was on her mind, she was a writer,storyteller and dynamic performer on the grandest scale. She was tough and shewas sensitive. She had been through extreme struggle and pain in her life andpersevered. She was elegant, edgy and bold. Shania became everyone’s favoritewoman because she represented how versatile a woman can be."
"The country I grewup with was daring,” says Twain today, curled up in a camouflage hoodie andjeans in a suite at The London West Hollywood, light-years away from her earlystruggles. The idiosyncratic country stars she gravitated toward — DollyParton, Willie Nelson — “were not cookie-cutter people,” shesays. “Some of them were really rugged. Some of them had criminal records! Theywere worlds apart stylistically, unique and original.”
But when she first got to Nashville, she was “a bit disappointed”to find “that sort of spirit wasn’t really acceptable,” recalls Twain. “It wastoo radical, and it made me feel insecure and like I didn’t belong.” The songsshe was assigned for her self-titled debut album were formulaic; the industry’sattitude toward sex at the time prudish. CMT initially banned the video for herfirst single, “What Made You Say That,” because one of her outfits exposed hermidriff.
It was that initial dissatisfaction that pushed Twain to rethinkwhat a female country star could be. “She was about as hard a worker as I’veever come across,” says Luke Lewis, who was the president of Mercury Nashvillewhen Twain started out. “I asked her what her dreams were, and she said, ‘Iwant to be bigger than Garth Brooks.’”
Shania Twain to Receive 'Icon' Award,Halsey Named 'Rising Star' at Billboard Women In Music 2016
“She was so undeniablyherself,” says singer Kelsea Ballerini, who cites Twain as an influenceand was born in 1993, the year her first album came out. “She wasn’t scared ofanything.”
Twain’s ambition paid off: Come OnOver spawned eight singles that reached the top 10 of Hot CountrySongs; for a time, you couldn’t pass through a mall or a gas station withouthearing them. In 1998, she set out on an 18-month stadium tour, traveling in a$1 million personalized bus, with her beloved Andalusian horse, Dancer,accompanying her. By the early 2000s, Twain’s videos made her bare-midriff daysfeel like a distant memory — just think of her cyberpunk catsuit in “I’mGonna Getcha Good!”
A new generation of female vocalists now see her as atrailblazer. “I learned to think outside genre boxes and the status quo bywatching her reinvent herself, and I'll always be grateful for the chances andrisks she took,” says Swift. At CMT’s Artists of the Year event in October,Twain received a cross-genre tribute from Ballerini (country), MeghanTrainor (pop) and Jill Scott (R&B). At his Nashville concertin August, rapper and fellow Canadian Drake told the crowd that he“grew up a fan” and dedicated his set to Twain, who was in the audience.
Yet it wasn’t until her late 40s that, says Twain, “I felt, ‘Oh, I really ownwhere I am. I guess I earned this.’ ” Now, on the heels of a two-year Vegasresidency, she’s finally getting back to her first love: songwriting. “I’m verysatisfied being a creative person,” she says. “I need that more than I need tobe a performer. Songwriting, for me, is kind of like cooking; everyone has tocook sometimes. Why not write songs?”
Over in the next room inher hotel suite, Twain’s husband, Swiss businessman Frédéric Thiébaud, quietlyworks on his laptop, his presence a reminder of one of Twain’s more recenttrials. In 2008, she was living in Switzerland with her then-husband, producer RobertJohn “Mutt” Lange, when she discovered that he was having an affair with herbest friend (and his secretary), Marie-Anne Thiébaud. “I was ready to die— to go to bed forever and never wake up,” Twain wrote in From ThisMoment On. “Or to hurt someone.” Shocked and bereft, she commiserated withMarie-Anne’s husband, Fred and, incredibly, wound up marrying him, on NewYear’s Day 2011.
“It has been a realtug-of-war, trying to come to terms with very extreme emotions and explain itto people in the format of a song,” says Twain. In Lange, she had lost not justa life partner but also a crucial collaborator. Having worked with the likesofAC/DC, Def Leppard and Bryan Adams, Lange reached out to Twainafter her first album, whisked her away to Majorca and helped forge hergroundbreaking hybrid sound. It was a risky proposition that succeeded wildly,as the pair turned out hit albums like The Woman inMe (1995), Come On Over (1997) and Up! (2002).
Margaret Norton/NBC/NBCUPhoto Bank via Getty ImagesTwain performed on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno in1995.
For Twain, the years afterthe breakup were a time of recovery. Through training and rehabilitation, shemade her way back to performing after suffering a crippling vocal injury (aprocess chronicled in an Oprah Winfrey Network miniseries), toured NorthAmerica (a “farewell tour” she says remains unfinished) and played Vegas.Embarking on her forthcoming record, which she expects to complete beforeyear’s end, without Lange was both liberating and scary. “It was a big leap ofcourage for me,” she says. “I didn’t know where to begin. I’d write every typeof song, every type of lyric, every type of melody. Who is going to say, ‘Allright, let’s hone in on this style?’ I didn’t have that direction, whereas withMutt I did.”
Nevertheless, she had asounding board in Thiébaud (“He’s a huge music lover”), and in producers likethe 29-year-old DJ/dance artist Matthew Koma, whom Twain discoveredthrough her and Lange’s 15-year-old son, Eja. “This is one of the first times Igot to work with somebody who was re-addressing what their message was afterhaving had such a huge, impactful career,” says Koma. “She wasn’t followingrules that she previously has followed.”
"I do most ofmy writing in the bathroom,” Twain says with a laugh. “Or in the basement. Oron the beach.” She wrote much of the new album at her house in the Bahamas,though one song was written in a hotel closet. “It’s a strange thing, but I doneed that isolation. I need to feel alone and intimate with my thoughts.”
She describes the finished product as “kind of schizophrenicmusically,” but maintains she’s “the glue.” Don’t expect a wronged-woman credolike Beyoncé’sLemonade. “I talk a lot more about pain,” she says, “but Ididn’t feel the need to be that literal about anger or hate. It’s verytriumphant in the end. I felt like, ‘Whew! I made it through the album! I madeit through writing all the songs!’ It was an emotional roller coaster, and thelyrics reflect that.”
Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood &More Female Singers Rock CMT Artists of the Year
Her own eclecticinterests may show through: She enjoys listening to everyone fromTwenty OnePilots to Rufus Wainwright and DJs like CashmereCat and Hardwell, whom she discovered through Eja. “Having that stuffon in the background, it has made me feel a little more courageous andconfident and happy about where music is going,” she says. And looking forward,she fantasizes about new collaborations: a duets album (Sia is high on herwish list), perhaps with one of her idols. “I went to aKanye West concertthe other night,” she says, “and backstage, someone passes me a phone and says,‘Here, talk to Stevie.’ It was Stevie Wonder. And I’m chatting with himand thinking, ‘Gosh, I never did get around to collaborating with him.’”
Backlit by a Hollywood view, Twain reflects on how far she hascome since her hardscrabble childhood. “How do you all of a sudden feellike you belong, if you grew up your whole life not belonging? It’s really toughto just flick that switch. Success doesn’t give that to you. I’m notcomfortable feeling famous or important. It just doesn’t sit right with me atall. If I could be successful and not famous, that would suit me better.”
Her voice softening, she adds, “I spent most of my childhoodembarrassed or feeling insecure or inadequate. That stays with you. That’s whatthat kind of life does to you. So, yeah, I try to enjoy my success in differentways. I think I’m finally starting to do that now.”
When Eilleen Twainwas in 12th grade — not yet Shania, not yet a global star — hermusic teacher asked her to sing an original song at a high school concert in Ottawa,Ontario. Though she had been singing professionally since she was 8, often tohelp her parents pay the bills, performing made her so nervous, she could feelit in her bladder. When the MC called her name, she was sitting in the trumpetsection of her school orchestra and felt a warm trickle down her leg. Thinkingfast, she kicked over the glass of water next to her chair and said, “Damn! Ispilled my water!” Then she took center stage with her acoustic guitar andknocked ’em dead.
Shania Twain: Photos of the BillboardWomen In Music 'Icon' Award Winner
Every enduringlysuccessful artist has a survival instinct, but Shania Twain’s is in Joan of Arcterritory. Her impoverished childhood in Ontario, detailed in her best-sellingmemoir From This Moment On, reads like Dickens: parents who didn’t alwayshave money for groceries and moved the family from place to place, sometimes tododge the rent; five kids who would sleep in dirt-floored basements; a fatherwho would get into violent fights with her mother, who sank into chronicdepression. One of Twain’s first attempts at songwriting was titled “Won’t YouCome Out to Play” — a plea for her mother to get out of bed.
All that happened before her 22nd year, when Twain was living inToronto, trying to make it as a singer-songwriter, and got a call that herparents had been killed in a car accident. To support herself and her youngerbrothers (Twain has one older sister), she took a job in a Las Vegas-stylerevue in Huntsville, Ontario, where she lived in a cabin with no running waterand washed her clothes in a stream. “Music has been my greatest therapy,”reflects Twain, 51, today. “It always has been. It’s a very great friend.”
Mary Rozzi“Self-doubt cancreep into my thinking,” says Twain, “so when I prove something tomyself, it gives me a little more courage.” Twain wears a Karl Lagerfeldtop and Norma Kamali Collection pants from New York Vintage.
Her life, and luck,changed dramatically in the early ’90s, when she moved to Nashville and herclear, companionable voice got noticed. The rest is history: 35 million albumssold in the United States, according to Nielsen Music, the most of any femalecountry artist in the last 25 years. Four No. 1s on Billboard’s TopCountry Albums chart, and seven on Hot Country Songs. Five Grammys,six Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards. Plus, a smashalbum, Come On Over, that holds the record for the most weeks at No. 1on Top Country Albums, with 15.7 million copies sold in the United States,making it the best-selling album by a woman (or any solo artist) since Nielsenbegan tracking sales in 1991.
Nick Jonas Shares His 5 Favorite SongsFrom 'Lifetime Crush' Shania Twain
Equal parts grit andpluck, Twain was the ’90s crossover queen, straddling country and pop withinfectious hits that were upbeat and empowering. In songs like “You’re Stillthe One,” “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and “Honey, I’m Home,” Twain injectedcountry twang with rock’n’roll muscle and feminist bravado, casting herself asa self-reliant modern gal: fun-loving but ambitious, sensual but tough andunafraid to rhyme “stress” with “PMS.”
"Shania showed theentire music industry that there were new options for where you could take yourcareer in country music, how widely you could expandit," says Taylor Swift. "She incorporated so many elementsinto what she represented — she created fashion moments, she was sexy, you gotthe impression she would tell you exactly what was on her mind, she was a writer,storyteller and dynamic performer on the grandest scale. She was tough and shewas sensitive. She had been through extreme struggle and pain in her life andpersevered. She was elegant, edgy and bold. Shania became everyone’s favoritewoman because she represented how versatile a woman can be."
"The country I grewup with was daring,” says Twain today, curled up in a camouflage hoodie andjeans in a suite at The London West Hollywood, light-years away from her earlystruggles. The idiosyncratic country stars she gravitated toward — DollyParton, Willie Nelson — “were not cookie-cutter people,” shesays. “Some of them were really rugged. Some of them had criminal records! Theywere worlds apart stylistically, unique and original.”
But when she first got to Nashville, she was “a bit disappointed”to find “that sort of spirit wasn’t really acceptable,” recalls Twain. “It wastoo radical, and it made me feel insecure and like I didn’t belong.” The songsshe was assigned for her self-titled debut album were formulaic; the industry’sattitude toward sex at the time prudish. CMT initially banned the video for herfirst single, “What Made You Say That,” because one of her outfits exposed hermidriff.
It was that initial dissatisfaction that pushed Twain to rethinkwhat a female country star could be. “She was about as hard a worker as I’veever come across,” says Luke Lewis, who was the president of Mercury Nashvillewhen Twain started out. “I asked her what her dreams were, and she said, ‘Iwant to be bigger than Garth Brooks.’”
Shania Twain to Receive 'Icon' Award,Halsey Named 'Rising Star' at Billboard Women In Music 2016
“She was so undeniablyherself,” says singer Kelsea Ballerini, who cites Twain as an influenceand was born in 1993, the year her first album came out. “She wasn’t scared ofanything.”
Twain’s ambition paid off: Come OnOver spawned eight singles that reached the top 10 of Hot CountrySongs; for a time, you couldn’t pass through a mall or a gas station withouthearing them. In 1998, she set out on an 18-month stadium tour, traveling in a$1 million personalized bus, with her beloved Andalusian horse, Dancer,accompanying her. By the early 2000s, Twain’s videos made her bare-midriff daysfeel like a distant memory — just think of her cyberpunk catsuit in “I’mGonna Getcha Good!”
A new generation of female vocalists now see her as atrailblazer. “I learned to think outside genre boxes and the status quo bywatching her reinvent herself, and I'll always be grateful for the chances andrisks she took,” says Swift. At CMT’s Artists of the Year event in October,Twain received a cross-genre tribute from Ballerini (country), MeghanTrainor (pop) and Jill Scott (R&B). At his Nashville concertin August, rapper and fellow Canadian Drake told the crowd that he“grew up a fan” and dedicated his set to Twain, who was in the audience.
Yet it wasn’t until her late 40s that, says Twain, “I felt, ‘Oh, I really ownwhere I am. I guess I earned this.’ ” Now, on the heels of a two-year Vegasresidency, she’s finally getting back to her first love: songwriting. “I’m verysatisfied being a creative person,” she says. “I need that more than I need tobe a performer. Songwriting, for me, is kind of like cooking; everyone has tocook sometimes. Why not write songs?”
Over in the next room inher hotel suite, Twain’s husband, Swiss businessman Frédéric Thiébaud, quietlyworks on his laptop, his presence a reminder of one of Twain’s more recenttrials. In 2008, she was living in Switzerland with her then-husband, producer RobertJohn “Mutt” Lange, when she discovered that he was having an affair with herbest friend (and his secretary), Marie-Anne Thiébaud. “I was ready to die— to go to bed forever and never wake up,” Twain wrote in From ThisMoment On. “Or to hurt someone.” Shocked and bereft, she commiserated withMarie-Anne’s husband, Fred and, incredibly, wound up marrying him, on NewYear’s Day 2011.
“It has been a realtug-of-war, trying to come to terms with very extreme emotions and explain itto people in the format of a song,” says Twain. In Lange, she had lost not justa life partner but also a crucial collaborator. Having worked with the likesofAC/DC, Def Leppard and Bryan Adams, Lange reached out to Twainafter her first album, whisked her away to Majorca and helped forge hergroundbreaking hybrid sound. It was a risky proposition that succeeded wildly,as the pair turned out hit albums like The Woman inMe (1995), Come On Over (1997) and Up! (2002).
Margaret Norton/NBC/NBCUPhoto Bank via Getty ImagesTwain performed on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno in1995.
For Twain, the years afterthe breakup were a time of recovery. Through training and rehabilitation, shemade her way back to performing after suffering a crippling vocal injury (aprocess chronicled in an Oprah Winfrey Network miniseries), toured NorthAmerica (a “farewell tour” she says remains unfinished) and played Vegas.Embarking on her forthcoming record, which she expects to complete beforeyear’s end, without Lange was both liberating and scary. “It was a big leap ofcourage for me,” she says. “I didn’t know where to begin. I’d write every typeof song, every type of lyric, every type of melody. Who is going to say, ‘Allright, let’s hone in on this style?’ I didn’t have that direction, whereas withMutt I did.”
Nevertheless, she had asounding board in Thiébaud (“He’s a huge music lover”), and in producers likethe 29-year-old DJ/dance artist Matthew Koma, whom Twain discoveredthrough her and Lange’s 15-year-old son, Eja. “This is one of the first times Igot to work with somebody who was re-addressing what their message was afterhaving had such a huge, impactful career,” says Koma. “She wasn’t followingrules that she previously has followed.”
"I do most ofmy writing in the bathroom,” Twain says with a laugh. “Or in the basement. Oron the beach.” She wrote much of the new album at her house in the Bahamas,though one song was written in a hotel closet. “It’s a strange thing, but I doneed that isolation. I need to feel alone and intimate with my thoughts.”
She describes the finished product as “kind of schizophrenicmusically,” but maintains she’s “the glue.” Don’t expect a wronged-woman credolike Beyoncé’sLemonade. “I talk a lot more about pain,” she says, “but Ididn’t feel the need to be that literal about anger or hate. It’s verytriumphant in the end. I felt like, ‘Whew! I made it through the album! I madeit through writing all the songs!’ It was an emotional roller coaster, and thelyrics reflect that.”
Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood &More Female Singers Rock CMT Artists of the Year
Her own eclecticinterests may show through: She enjoys listening to everyone fromTwenty OnePilots to Rufus Wainwright and DJs like CashmereCat and Hardwell, whom she discovered through Eja. “Having that stuffon in the background, it has made me feel a little more courageous andconfident and happy about where music is going,” she says. And looking forward,she fantasizes about new collaborations: a duets album (Sia is high on herwish list), perhaps with one of her idols. “I went to aKanye West concertthe other night,” she says, “and backstage, someone passes me a phone and says,‘Here, talk to Stevie.’ It was Stevie Wonder. And I’m chatting with himand thinking, ‘Gosh, I never did get around to collaborating with him.’”
Backlit by a Hollywood view, Twain reflects on how far she hascome since her hardscrabble childhood. “How do you all of a sudden feellike you belong, if you grew up your whole life not belonging? It’s really toughto just flick that switch. Success doesn’t give that to you. I’m notcomfortable feeling famous or important. It just doesn’t sit right with me atall. If I could be successful and not famous, that would suit me better.”
Her voice softening, she adds, “I spent most of my childhoodembarrassed or feeling insecure or inadequate. That stays with you. That’s whatthat kind of life does to you. So, yeah, I try to enjoy my success in differentways. I think I’m finally starting to do that now.”
