As Matisse perfected the use of vivid color, as Caravaggio luxuriated in the play of light and shadow, Shania Twain long ago mastered the fine art of parentheses and exclamation points. The country superstar’s 1997 smash Come on Over alone—the biggest country album of the ’90s, and the best-selling album by a solo female artist in any genre, ever—is a riot of hairpin turns and rampant enthusiasm. It is the pinnacle of silly punctuation as pure joy.
Most likely you can hum the riff to “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” from memory even if you’ve never listened to it by choice. But don’t sleep on “Whatever You Do! Don’t!” Or the sass-driven twangfest “I’m Holdin’ on to Love (To Save My Life).” Or the self-explanatory “If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask!” Or the profoundly romantic “Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You).”
Twain’s previous album, 1995’s nearly as enormous The Woman in Me, serves up the brassy “(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here!” and the vulnerable “The Woman in Me (Needs the Man in You)” back to back. But her zenith still resides on 2002’s Up!, with the buoyant, immortal double whammy “I’m Not in the Mood (To Say No)!”
This is minor Shania, a goofy little throwaway whose go-getter lyrics range from “Won’t find me on the couch / Sleepin’ like a slouch” to “Ain’t no need to plan it / Jump right in and jam it.” Nothing in the song itself delivers the same goofy whiplash exuberance of the “(To Say No)!” in the song title. It’s the 17th track on a 19-track album, and it sounds like it. But it’s fun to compare the goofiness of the song’s various iterations: In the ultimate pop-crossover flex, Up! came out in three versions, with green for traditional country (more twang), red for rock (more synths and guitars), and as we see above, blue for international (more tablas and so forth).
This was all Extra in an awfully charming way, proof that Twain could do anything, win over anyone. And something about her tone on “I’m Not in the Mood (To Say No)!”—so laid-back, so ebullient, so carefree—is bracingly bittersweet now, in light of the fact that it would take her 15 years to release another album, and she’d deal with all manner of ludicrous calamity in the interim.
Perhaps you are aware that her husband and creative partner, super-producer Mutt Lange, had an affair with Twain’s close friend, leading to a messy divorce and Twain’s subsequent marriage to her now-ex-close-friend’s ex-husband. Perhaps you are aware that she got bitten by a tick in Virginia, contracted Lyme disease, and effectively lost her singing voice for years. She wrote an autobiography, 2011’s From This Moment On, which recounts some of this, and also includes harrowing childhood tales of domestic abuse and abject poverty. That same year, she starred in a discomfiting OWN reality show with the delightful name Why Not? With Shania Twain. In 2015, she launched a wink-wink “farewell tour” that it turns out was definitely not her farewell tour; starting in 2012, she also did a lengthy and equally lucrative Las Vegas residency that climaxed with her singing one of her biggest and most romantic hits, “You’re Still the One,” to a horse.
All of that was a very strange mixture of seclusion and prominence, of triumph and tabloid-borne tragedy. Twain is back this week with Now, her fifth album, a grueling decade and a half in the making. She wrote all the songs herself, and unsurprisingly, there’s a darker, angrier, sultrier tone to most of them. Even the songs called “More Fun” and “I’m Alright” are awfully stormy; “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” includes the line “We’re not broken / Not yet.” The record kicks off with the reggae-tinged fist pumper “Swingin’ With My Eyes Closed,” and Twain is definitely doing that, though sometimes it feels like one hand is tied behind her back. She is confronting her weaknesses in a way that prevents her from falling back on her bubbly, carefree strengths. For example, there are no exclamation points or parentheses in sight.
The queen of 1990s Nashville hails from Windsor, Canada, and her trailblazing starts there: Twain cleared the path that allowed the queen of 2000s Nashville to hail from Reading, Pennsylvania. She debuted in 1993 with Shania Twain, bazooka-voiced and wholesomely frisky, crooning classicist line-dance jams like “God Ain’t Gonna Getcha for That” with reverb-drenched good cheer, flirting whilst trapped in a deep well. It’s a perfectly pleasant album that gets way better if you imagine that all the male backing vocals are provided by the wolf on the cover.
But Twain’s charm offensive began in earnest when she met—and quickly married—Robert John “Mutt” Lange, meticulous recluse and arena-rock producer deity, who’d made the likes of the Cars, AC/DC, and Def Leppard sound 200 feet tall, and set about giving his wife the same superhero treatment. Every key change on 1995’s The Woman in Me—and there are a ton of key changes on this thing—sounds like God’s Camaro shifting gears. “Any Man of Mine” is “We Will Rock You” reborn as a wedding line-dance spectacular that results in six minor injuries and 12 new marriage proposals. You’ve never seen anybody spray down a horse with half as much radiant aplomb.
But the almighty jam on that record is “(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here!,” a pickup-line-skewering battle hymn that typifies the genius of the Shania-Mutt alliance. It sounds shiny and pristine and ungodly enormous, but still has a recognizable human being at its chewy center, an affable everygirl sliding around in her socks amid such sonically palatial digs. Lange painstakingly constructed the galaxy, but Twain was the sun it all revolved around.
Come on Over doubled down on the charm and the grandiosity both. “That Don’t Impress Me Much” is an unmitigated delight that only grew more delightful with Twain’s recent revelation that Brad Pitt gets name-dropped because she found his nude photos unremarkable. The record also fires off two slow-dance classics almost immediately: “You’re Still the One” has a gorgeous melody and a robotic backing choir that sounds like Robert Palmer’s music-video fembots with the gender politics reversed. And “From This Moment On,” which soundtracked plenty of weddings itself, sails the seas of highest-possible-quality cheese; her harmonies with Nashville pro Bryan White on the line “My dreams / Came true / Because / Of you” are a heartstopper. It’s the rousing theme song to a version of Top Gun where the volleyball scene ends very differently.
Up! arrived in 2002 and became Twain’s third straight diamond-selling record—that’s 10 million copies sold, and that probably isn’t happening to anybody ever again. That record is as much of a good thing as anybody can stand, superhuman in its cuddliness, its cheesiness, its hugeness. The actual person at its chewy center is a little less recognizable. “Forever and for Always” sounds simultaneously tender and post-human, every surface and texture gleaming, Twain’s voice swooping and dipping like an alien spacecraft skywriting. It was hard to tell where she could possibly go from there. “Straight down” is not what anyone would’ve guessed, or preferred.
The interminable years of personal strife that followed—Twain and Lange divorced in 2010—certainly gave her plenty of grim writing material, but she struggled with how to synthesize it. Her full-scale comeback has endured a few false starts, including “Today Is Your Day,” a treacly 2011 single spun off her reality show that found her desperately trying to talk herself into the song’s own go-getter optimism: “Today is your day / Everything’s goin’ your way.” Not yet.
It was fun to imagine that Twain’s new record, whenever it finally appeared, would be a blistering, vituperative divorce album, with the same momentous air of fury and empowerment as Here, My Dear or Jagged Little Pill or No More Drama. But that doesn’t play to her strengths: It’s not that Twain can’t convey anger or pain or doubt, but those aren’t the emotions you’d traditionally associate with her. Now is a huge challenge, and a huge departure, just in terms of tone. “I’m one of those lucky ones / Who dreams out loud, and it all comes,” she sings on “Home Now,” an early track full of warm banjo and violins: It’s not a great song, but it’s familiar, and plenty of fans prefer familiar to great at this stage in even a superstar’s career.
But things quickly turn noirish from there: “Light of My Life” is theoretically a love song, but Twain’s voice is low and sultry and heavy, with something of Lana Del Rey’s fainting-couch exhaustion to it. (The coquettish mmm-hmm backing vocals add to the femme-fatale effect.) And “Poor Me” is just plain dark, confronting her personal demons head on, with a wounded ferocity that might make Lange squirm but will definitely make you squirm: “I know it should get better / Oh, but it never does / I wish he’d never met her / Then everything would be the way it was.”
Now’s first single was “Life’s About to Get Good,” another shaky forced-cheer attempt at faking it until you make it: Twain starts off with the line “I wasn’t just broken / I was shattered,” and doesn’t much even try to convince you she’s pieced herself back together yet. But the album as a whole isn’t the dirge you might have feared: “Who’s Gonna Be Your Girl?” is moody and resentful and fixated on D-I-V-O-R-C-E, but it makes excellent use of the new heaviness and richness in Twain’s voice. It slams a door or two, but opens a window. Same deal with “We Got Something They Don’t,” which sneaks in a rowdy horn section and plenty of strident defiance:
They may say we’re done
That we will never win this one
We know differently
They don’t know you
And they don’t know me
When Twain abdicated her throne in the early 2000s, Taylor Swift seized the opportunity, with an even more aggressive and explicit approach to country crossover stardom and global domination. But in 2017, the very notion of a Queen of Country is under fire, with radio and Spotify playlists alike dominated by a Rowdy Bros vs. Courtly Gentlemen showdown that leaves little to no room for female artists of any age or temperament. Now is profoundly unlikely to set the charts aflame, even with four different au courant producers crafting an updated, electronic sound that nods at the Chainsmokers and the smokier, gloomier end of the pop-star spectrum, from Demi Lovato to Halsey. Let those others fight it out, though; Twain has already done enough numbers to last anyone several lifetimes.
But this record still plants a flag: If nothing else, it will ably support another boffo world tour and, once she’s tired of life on the road, perhaps another long Vegas interval, where Twain can let the adoring crowds come to her (and the horse). You may emerge from Now mourning the loss of the Old Shania, but the New Shania is clearly still in mourning, too. The message of those monster ’90s records, radically distilled, was always until a boy proves he’s worth it, he’s not worth it. And though she’s now happily remarried and finally relaunched into the pop-star firmament, it’s not her happiness that’s preoccupying her at the moment. Let her grieve, and seethe, and reclaim her time. Cheerful Shania will be back, eventually. And a forced, premature exclamation point is far worse than no exclamation point at all.
