August 5, 1995
By JOHN SAKAMOTO
Toronto Sun
When the end of the year rolls around and we're vainly trying to stuff the many-tentacled "pop music scene" into some sort of tidy package, the most significant Canadian success story of '95 just might be Shania Twain.
As of this week, the Timmins native had:
Topped the country charts in both Canada and the U.S.
Crossed over to the Top 10 on the pop charts.
Sold close to 200,000 copies of her second album, The Woman In
Me, in Canada, and two million in the U.S.
None of which seems to have thrown the firmly grounded Twain - who co-hosts CISS-FM's day-long Fan Fest, with DJ Cliff Dumas, tomorrow at Canada's Wonderland - for a loop. "The fact that all these things are coming back from the music is really something," she said yesterday from the home she shares in Lake Placid, N.Y. with husband/collaborator "Mutt" Lange, best known as a producer for Def Leppard and Bryan Adams. "At the same time, it's something I've been working toward for a very long time.
"I feel prepared for the time it's consuming, I feel prepared for all that kind of stuff. The songwriting and the performer end of it, I've been doing all my life." That life includes singing in bars from the age of eight, working on a forestry crew, and raising her three younger siblings after their parents were killed in a car crash eight years ago.
No wonder Twain is unfazed by grumblings about her steamy videos and the "pop" flavor of her brand of country.
"But what is pop?" Twain asks pointedly. "I mean, pop goes from Snoop Doggy Dogg to Celine Dion."
"We're just all people who make music for the purpose of pleasing as many people as we can. That's the idea. It just so happens that it actually is working for me, even if it's with a lot of people who don't normally listen to country music." As for those sexy videos, "I think for women, the line is drawn a little narrower for what is acceptable," she argues. "But it's just the way my videos are. Because I'm young, and I want to have fun and enjoy the music and feel comfortable with what I'm wearing. I don't want to be confined.
"At the same time, I have my own limits. I mean, this is far from anything I would consider rude or over the edge. I would never walk onto the screen with my bra on. I don't know if I'd ever be in a bikini.
"I'm actually quite shy about certain things like that," she continues. "I'm even shy on the beach. Usually it takes me a good few days on vacation to go anywhere in my bathing suit. I've got to put a wrap around me. But even to be in a bathing suit in a wrap in a video would be considered sexy."
Meanwhile, Twain is prepping for her first major tour, which will probably kick off in February, and trying to deal with the fact that she and Lange see each other, on average, just three days out of every month.
"It's really tough," she sighs, "but when you've got a number-one album, it's not going to stay number one forever.
"While it's rolling," she concludes, "you roll with it."