Shania Twain: Even Showgirls Get The Blues
ON A LATE MORNING IN EARLY SUMMER, SHANIA TWAIN decided to catch a few minutes alone with her horses. This was at her place way out in the Adirondacks, past Lake Saranac, New York, near Cat Mountain. The place is actually a twenty-square-mile estate, with an electronic security gate at the entrance, lots of forest, a great big lake and a road that snakes back into the middle of nowhere. Overlooking the lake is a giant wooden structure, freshly built, composed of a world-class recording studio, apartments for guests, room for the Twain Zone business offices and all the usual amenities; and this isn’t even the main house, which has yet to be built, though there are steps leading up to where it one day may be.
It was almost noiseless out there, and deeply serene. For a while, no one knew where Shania was, and various nervous Twain personnel scurried about. Then she ambled down from the stables with her hair in a topknot, in jeans and very little makeup, and swung inside the back of the bus that would shortly take her on her first-ever world tour but that now carried her into Lake Placid to practice her stage act.
Even without a tour, Shania had gone from being the biggest thing in country music, with 1995’s The Woman in Me (sales: 10 million, the most of any album by a female country artist), to among the biggest things in both country and pop, with last winter’s Come On Over (sales; 4 million and rising), both of them produced by her husband, Robert “Mutt” Lange, who had also produced hit records for Def Leppard and Michael Bolton, In this regard, she was almost as much of a crossover sensation as Dolly Parton or Garth Brooks — more, really, since Dolly and Garth sold like pop stars but never really shed their corn pone. Shania, though, had almost too little country for some of her critics and the numbers to suggest that she might be too big for that world, anyway. During one week in May, her single “You’re Still the One” was both the Number. Two pop song and the Number One country single in America. Meanwhile, MTV began playing the song’s video, following VHi’s lead. Then, in Detroit, Shania sold out the Pine Knob Amphitheater in just twenty-nine minutes, a pace matched only by the Who, Metallica, Bob Seger and Jimmy Buffett.
Naturally, this kind of success had not occurred overnight, nor without concomitant controversy and the pissing off of various folks. Nor, in Shania’s Case, did it happen without a major personal tragedy; her parents were killed in a car accident when she was twenty-one, leaving her to care for three younger siblings. But, looking out her bus window at the passing countryside, she did not speak of these things now. Pleasantly, she settled in and started to give an accounting of herself as, among other things, a simple Canadian girl from a rugged gold-mining city called Timmins, in the frigid northern reaches of Ontario, 500 miles beyond Toronto. She was a shy teenager, a little at odds with her sexuality, even angry at times over the unwanted attention of boys. She said that she preferred not to think of herself as a country artist or as a pop artist but, simply, as an artist who had done “whatever it took to get work.” She said that for as long as she could remember, she had but one dream. “My goal has always been to be international,” she said. “It’s what I have wanted right from the start,” To that end, she wrote songs that were clever and decidedly commercial and used her looks to give them visual punch, and she made no apologies for either.
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