Shania Twain Left on Top. Now She Wants Back In.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, California — The last time Shania Twain released an album — the experimental country-but-not- quite opus “Up!” — it sold 874,000 copies in its first week, and went on to receive the Recording Industry Association of America’s diamond certification for 10 million copies sold, her third album in a row to reach that milestone.
That was in 2002, around the peak of the CD age, and an era in which the pop mainstream hadn’t yet absorbed hip-hop. At the time, Ms. Twain was a cross-genre titan, a country singer who — with her then-husband Mutt Lange, the producer who boosted the sound of AC/DC and Def Leppard — made titanic, eclectic music that infuriated Nashville purists with its flashy embrace of pop theatrics, but dominated the charts. On songs like “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” she was brassy and a little salacious, a feminist triumphalist.
Much has changed in the intervening years. Country music now incorporates many of the risks Ms. Twain innovated; and Ms. Twain divorced Mr. Lange following a tabloid scandal.
And yet Ms. Twain, 52, is not apprehensive about her return with her fifth album, “Now.” “I really feel like I’m coming back into worlds that I already know,” the singer said. “Now” is, like most of her albums, not quite country music, though she has swapped the excess of her last albums for something smaller and warmer.
The new album’s first single, “Life’s About to Get Good,” fizzled on the chart. But radio might not be Ms. Twain’s path, said Cindy Mabe, the president of Universal Music Group Nashville. “It’s the magnifier,” she said, “but frankly, does she need it? No. She’s a global icon.” She pointed out the breadth of Ms. Twain’s release plan — award shows in France and Germany, a concert in London’s Hyde Park, TV in the United States and Canada — as proof that “no one has the reach that Shania does.”
“It is way more acceptable to be different, to be a more normal shape,” Ms. Twain said, discussing how at her peak, she wore custom-made clothes when styles didn’t fit properly. “It’s actually fashionable to have a bigger butt now. I remember feeling, like, ‘I cannot get my butt into these pants!’ ”
Ms. Twain’s own life has changed radically, too. After 14 years of marriage, she separated from Mr. Lange in 2008 after he had an affair with her close friend. ( The divorce was finalized in 2010.) In turn, Ms. Twain mar- ried that friend’s husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, in 2011.
Ms. Twain has always written her own songs, and her gift is still acute. “My songwriting is my diary and it is my best friend,” she said. “It’s a place I can go to where it’s not expecting anything from me. There’s just no inhibitions there.”
And there is no awkwardness, she said, in working through sentiments about her old relationship while in a new one. “I didn’t marry a guy that can’t handle that,” she said, then added, “I wouldn’t let him hear everything that I ever write, trust me.”
“Now” marks the first time Ms. Twain has delved into that period of her life in song, but her return to public life began in 2011 with a scarred, vulnerable autobiography, “From This Moment On.” When it came time to re- emerge musically, she chose the “controlled ideal environment” of a Las Vegas residency, at Caesars Palace, which began in 2012 and ran for two years.
During that time, she had lost her voice; nerves connected to her vocal cords atrophied, a side effect of Lyme disease. Now, she likens herself to an injured athlete — she exercises her voice carefully: “I can’t just get up and sing.”
She also was writing songs. But mainly she was focused on motherhood — “baking cake, packing lunches, running back and forth to soccer and all that stuff” for Eja, her 16-year- old son with Mr. Lange.
Ms. Twain said she had to decide whether to make an album that eschews the contemporary music conversation in favor of something like an acoustic singer- songwriter album, or a duets project, or something like one with classical arrangements — all reasonable options for her.
“That would have been safer,” she said, but she chose a different path. “I want it to be relatable, and that means sonically relatable.”