‘This is me now’
Shania Twain tells Mesfin Fekadu how she found a new voice after a long illness.
‘ I just feel like I’ve climbed this huge mountain and I made it to the top . . . And, you know, coming from a time when I really thought I would never record an album again.’
Now: she took on the role of caring for her three younger siblings. She moved to Nashville, but the country star with pop flavour had trouble settling into the new town. She eventually married producer Robert ‘‘Mutt’’ Lange, and they cowrote some of her most successful songs, but they later divorced.
Cindy Mabe, president of Universal Music Group Nashville, says the new album is a reflection sharing it with world. This is the most brave record that she’s ever made.’’
In the near two decades in between albums, Twain was busy raising her son and got married again. But she still wrote songs, collecting poems, lyrics and melodies over the years. She spent two years creating Now and worked with four producers on the project: Ron Aniello (Bruce Springsteen), Jake Gosling (Ed Sheeran), Jacquire King (Kings of Leon) and Matthew Koma (Zedd, Carly Rae Jepsen).
Twain said she picked those collaborators because they respected her decision to write each song by herself, something she hadn’t done since before recording with Lange.
‘‘I was motivated by the challenge of carrying the risk or the weight of doing it without any guidance or any influence, any feedback. That to me was the ultimate test of independence,’’ she says.
The album’s lead single, the fun and breezy Life’s About to Get Good, captures Twain’s energy perfectly: She’s happy, and ready for the next chapter of her life and musical career. The song peaked at No 33 on Billboard’s Hot country songs chart, and despite having an album that sold more than 20 million units in the US and two others sell more than 10 million each, Twain and her label aren’t feeling pressure.
‘‘Am I pleased where the first single went? Not really, but I’m just about exposing this record. So with all the other things that we have dropping I’m pleased,’’ Mabe says. ‘‘We have made noise and... I feel good about where we’re going with this record and that it will be exposed.’’
‘‘The industry has changed so much now . . . It’s like comparing apples and oranges now,’’ Twain says of selling albums today compared to the 1990s and early 2000s. ‘‘It’s just different and the tallying is coming from such a broad spectrum, so I’m not feeling that pressure just because it just doesn’t even exist anymore. The pressure for me is really more, ‘Will I write music that relates to my fans? Will they relate to what I have to say?’
‘‘I’m different now. I think differently now. I’ve evolved. That’s why I call the album Now,’’ she says. ‘‘This is me now.’’ – AP