Shania Twain enjoyed an extraordinary hat trick of album successes with her second, third and fourth releases. The Woman in Me in 1995, Come on Over in 1997, and Up! in 2002 all sold enough to earn diamond certification or better in the US – that’s over 10 million copies shifted, three times in a row, with the middle one selling more than 20 million. Those are some seriously comfy laurels to rest on for the Canadian country pop superstar.
Since Up!, there was nothing until the album Now, 15 years later. However her main problem was not counting her money but fixing her voice. A tick bite in 2004 gave her a case of Lyme disease that damaged her vocal cords. Open-throat surgery in 2018 improved things, though on this sixth album her tone does sound lower, with a bit more of a rocky rasp to it.
You’d never mistake her for Tom Waits, but it gives her a gravitas that was missing from the camp party anthems that became her biggest hits. It sounds particularly appealing over the energetic strumming of Not Just a Girl, so it’s strange that she seems to be complaining about being infantilised in the lyrics. The title track has a similar theme: “I’m not a baby, I’m not a toy.” No kidding. You’re the 57-year-old biggest selling woman in country music history, with your own Las Vegas residency and two O2 Arena dates in the diary. Surely most people are taking you seriously at this point?
Much of the rest of the music is frothier than it might need to be at this stage. Reading her interviews, this is someone who has been through the mill: divorce, romantic betrayal, a tragic childhood and a case of Covid so severe that she had to be air evacuated from Switzerland. On this record, all she wants to do is zhuzh up her fanbase, with the single Giddy Up! suggesting a particularly peppy case of enforced line dancing. Waking Up Dreaming has the kind of knee-pumping beats familiar from countless Eighties hits and a chorus that can stand up next to those overfamiliar old hits.
She risks an F-word on Pretty Liar, and when she does slow down a little on Last Day of Summer, I wondered how she might sound doing a late period Johnny Cash and using those long-suffering vocal cords on some stripped-back classics. After all that, she’s earned the right to try something different.
