At the age of 60 but possessed by the fierce energy of a woman half her age, Shania Twain flies into conversation with an elusive sense of spirit and serenity. We need to worry less, she says. The numbers mean nothing when reminded she’s the best-selling female artist in country music history.
And the best advice she was ever given? “Honesty is everything,” Twain says, without hesitation. “Without that, there is nothing. That means with yourself, that means to others. It’s a check, and you just can’t go wrong with honesty.”
A little bit country, and a little bit rock’n’roll. “Honesty is everything,” says Shania Twain.
In a film sound stage tucked into the outskirts of Toronto, Canada, Twain’s 162-centimetre frame seems too slight for the crackling bundle of energy who fires up when the cameraman calls action. She’s genuinely charming. Polite, in that Southern way, almost to a fault. And unmoved by the suggestion that she blazed the trail that transformed music and sent country to the pop mainstream.
“There may be something about the nostalgic nature of country music, of the language in a lot of the lyrics and things that makes people in this time for some reason gravitate to that music,” Twain says. “When I was a kid, it was my grandmother’s music.”
So how do we explain the dramatic narrowing of the once-vast gulf between country and mainstream pop? The cultural shift led by women such as Twain and 79-year-old legend Dolly Parton has cut open a path to the mainstream of music for artists such as Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, Garth Brooks and, more recently, Orville Peck, Beyoncé, Post Malone and Taylor Swift.
“Young people, maybe, are gravitating to something … the nostalgia of it, the need for more tangible things, a tactile existence, and things that they could use with their hands because virtual reality has become such a part of their daily lives that they crave things that are more tangible,” Twain says. “When you talk about a cornfield, they dream about that. [These songs] make us dream.
Country superstar Shania Twain.Credit: Robert E. Klein/Invision/AP
“By the time I was making my own records, it was a cross-breed of a rock and country, and that, I guess, was its own thing,” Twain says. “That liberated a lot of people coming up in the next generation to go, oh, country is so much broader than I ever imagined it could be. But that wasn’t me doing that on purpose or anything. It was just me saying, this is the way I like to hear country.”
Twain is on set filming a new television advertisement for the Australian arm of the global delivery app Uber Eats. The spot is intended to follow in the footsteps of many media-sticky campaigns Uber has run, notably those featuring Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Cher and others. In this campaign, Twain has collaborated with Australian singer/songwriter Tom Carty on a new song, Can’t Do That If You’re Driving.
