ON MUSIC AND MOTHERHOOD
Superstar embraces her new-found creative freedom as the sole songwriter on Now
Now has echoes of Shania Twain’s most famous albums, but it strays even further from her country roots. The September release from the Timmins, Ont., pop hitmaker has lots of rock, soul and even reggae touches thrown in. It is also the first time that she wrote all of the songs entirely by herself — a major change from the albums she cowrote with her ex-husband Robert John (Mutt) Lange.
“First of all, it was a decision of independence,” Twain said Thursday, when she met with a handful of journalists at a Montreal hotel. “I may never make a record like this again. It was so important to me that I do it alone. I needed to rediscover my sole songwriting because for 15 years I had written with (Lange), which was amazing. We both had incredible success. He had the biggest success of his career with my collaboration. So it was very successful and very harmonious. It was a good combination.
“But I’m like, ‘Now I’m without him. I don’t want to just jump to another collaborator. I’m just going to do it myself.’ ... I really enjoyed and indulged the creative freedom.
“There’s pros and cons to doing things very independently. The pros are that you have all this creative freedom and you are in the driver’s seat, and it’s your vision that is getting realized. The risk is taking the full responsibility. So you can’t share the responsibility.”
Twain met with the journalists to discuss the new album, her upcoming tour — set to kick off in May — as well as Sunday’s big gig at the Grey Cup in Ottawa, where she will perform at halftime.
Now is Twain’s first new studio album since Up! in 2002. Her comeback started when she began a two-year residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 2012, and it was the period when she finally felt her voice was back in shape to perform live and record. In 2004, Twain discovered she had lesions in her vocal cords because, she said, of Lyme disease. She was forced to stop singing for eight years.
“I was petrified coming into Las Vegas, but that was what forced me into (vocal) therapy,” Twain said. “I said, ‘If I can’t do it, I’ll know I’ve just gotta shut it down and it’s over forever.’ But I succeeded at that residency. I actually did it. When I got through that residency, I knew I could make the album.”
Lange produced and cowrote her best-known albums, The Woman in Me (1995), Come On Over (1997) and Up! (2002), albums that spawned hits like Any Man of Mine, Man! I Feel Like a Woman and You’re Still the One. The pair divorced in 2010. They have a 16-year-old son, Eja, who Twain says was raised en français.
“I learned French as a kid like a lot of kids going to English schools,” said Twain, who is currently married to Frédéric Thiébaud. “I went to an English school, so the French was limited to basic nouns ... and very crude grammar,” Twain said.
But she picked up much more French when she moved to Switzerland in 1997.
“I raised my son primarily in Switzerland, so his first language was French because I forced myself” to speak to him in French, Twain said. “I would recommend that to anyone who wants (their child) to learn a new language. If you’re having a child, take advantage of that.”
The 105th Grey Cup will kick off in Ottawa at 5 p.m. on Sunday, and according to one of Twain’s latest tweets, she is “so excited to perform.”