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Shania Twain, (born Eilleen Regina Edwards; August 28, 1965) is a Canadian singer and songwriter in the country and pop music genres. Her third album Come on Over is the biggest-selling album of all time by a female musician, and the best-selling album in the history of country music. She is the only female musician to have three albums certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America, and is also the best selling artist in Canada, with all three of her studio albums being certified double diamond by the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Twain has achieved both critical and financial success, having received five Grammy awards, 27 BMI Songwriter awards, and sold over 65 million albums worldwide to date including 48 million in the US alone. Emerging in the mid-'90s, Shania Twain became the most popular country music artist since Garth Brooks. Skillfully fusing mainstream, AOR rock production with country-pop, Twain and her producer/husband, Robert John "Mutt" Lange, created a commercial juggernaut with her second album, The Woman in Me. The record became a multi-platinum phenomenon, peaking at number five on the pop charts and eventually selling over nine million copies in America alone. Twain might have sold a lot of records, but like other mega-selling acts before her, she earned few good reviews most critics accused her of diluting country with bland, anthemic hard rock techniques and shamelessly selling her records with sexy videos. Fans ignored such complaints, mainly because her audience was comprised of many listeners who had grown accustomed to such marketing strategies by constant exposure to MTV. And Twain, in many ways, was the first country artist to fully exploit MTV's style. She created a sexy, video-oriented image, she didn't even tour during the year when The Woman in Me was on the top of the country charts -- that appealed not only to the country audience, but also to pop fans. In turn, she became a country music phenomenon. Early on in her musical development, her parents pushed her on-stage, making her perform frequently around their little town; often, she would be pulled out of bed around one in the morning to sing at local bars, since as a child she could only appear in the clubs after they had stopped serving alcohol. In addition to bars, she sang on local radio and television stations and community events. When she was 21 years old, both of her parents died in a car crash, forcing her to take responsibility for her four siblings. In order to pay the bills and keep food on the table, she took a job singing at a resort in Deerhurst. With the money she earned at the resort, she bought a house and had the family settle down. At the resort, she sang show tunes, from George Gershwin to Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a little country. Twain stayed there for three years, at the end of which all of her siblings had begun lives of their own. When she was finally independent again, she assembled a demo tape of her songs, and her manager set up a showcase concert in Canada. Twain caught the attention of a few insiders with the concert, and within a few months Mercury Nashville had signed her to their roster. Her eponymous debut album was released in 1993, and although it wasn't a major hit, it performed respectably in the United States, launching two minor hit singles, "What Made You Say That" and "Dance with the One That Brought You"; in Europe, the album was more successful and Country Music Television Europe named her Rising Video Star of the Year. Shortly after the release of Shania Twain, the singer met and fell in love with Robert John "Mutt" Lange, a hard rock producer known for his work with AC/DC, Def Leppard, Foreigner, and the Cars. Lange had been wanting to move into country music for a while, and after hearing Twain's debut album, he decided to get in contact with her with the intention of working on an album. By the end of the year, the pair had married and begun working on her second record. The two either wrote or co-wrote the material that eventually formed The Woman in Me. The Woman in Me was released in the spring of 1995. Its first single, "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?," went to number 11 early in the year, quickly followed by "Any Man of Mine," which became her first number one single in the spring. The album's title track went to number 14 in the fall, while the fourth single, "(If You're Not in It for Love) I'm Outta Here!," rocketed to number one toward the end of the year; early in 1996 "No One Needs to Know" became her third number one hit. By the beginning of 1996, The Woman in Me had sold over six million copies and broken the record for the most weeks spent at number one on the country charts. During the course of 1996, it would rack another three million in sales. Come on Over followed in 1997. She spent the next two years touring the globe in support of the album; by the end of 1999, Come on Over had sold 36 million copies. Twain took a sabbatical and returned to her Swiss home for some down time with her husband. The next summer, she and Lange welcomed their first child. A son, whom they named Eja, arrived August 21, 2001. During this time, Twain brainstormed for a fourth album. While balancing a domestic life and a career, the end result was Up!, which appeared in November 2002. Up! was released to considerable fanfare - not only was it accompanied by a huge publicity blitz but it appeared in three different mixes, designed to appeal to country, pop and international audiences - and it initially was a big success, selling over 870,000 copies in the US upon its first week and debuting at number one in the Billboard charts, but despite such hits as “I'm Gonna Getcha Good!” and “Forever and For Always,” it failed to have the same kind of staying power as The Woman In Me or Come On Over. Those two albums sold over 10 million copies a piece in the US, whereas Up! sold 5.5 million -- an impressive number that only pales when compared to her track record. As Up! worked its way down the charts, Shania released a Greatest Hits album in the holiday season of 2004; the compilation was a great success, going triple platinum in the US, where it peaked at number two on the Billboard charts. In the wake of Greatest Hits, Twain spent the next few years quietly, working on several non-music related projects and appearing only on soundtracks. As of 2007, she was still working on her follow-up to Up!. Twain was born in Windsor, Ontario, the daughter of Sharon (née Morrison) and Clarence Edwards, who divorced when she was two. Her mother then moved Eilleen and her sister Jill to Timmins, Ontario where her mother met and married Jerry Twain, a native Ojibwa. He then adopted Eilleen and her siblings, legally changing her name to Eilleen Twain. Because of her connection to her stepfather, in the past people had the impression that her ancestry was Ojibwa, but her actual biological ethnic makeup is Irish and French Canadian, and she has also stated in an interview that her biological father came from a Cree background. One of five children, Eilleen Twain had a hard childhood in Timmins, Ontario. Her parents earned little, and there was often a shortage of food and money in the household. She did not confide her situation to school authorities for fear they might break up the family. In the remote, rugged community she learned to hunt and to chop wood. Aside from working at an Ontario McDonald's restaurant, Twain began to earn money by singing in local clubs and bars from a very young age to support her family. She was singing in bars at the age of just eight to try to make ends meet, often earning twenty dollars between midnight and two in the morning when the bar had closed but the people remained. Although she has expressed a dislike for singing in such a smoky atmosphere at such a young age, Shania believes that this was her performing arts school on the road to becoming a successful singer. At one point, while Jerry was at work, her mother drove the rest of the family 425 miles to a Toronto homeless shelter for assistance. (source: Shania's interview in the January 2005 Readers Digest). At 13, Eilleen Twain was invited to perform on CBC television's Tommy Hunter Show. While attending Timmins High and Vocational School in Timmins, Ontario, she was the singer for a local band called "Longshot" which covered Top 40 music. In 1984, she sang a duet performance on an album by Canadian musician (and present-day CKTB radio personality) Tim Denis. When her mother and adoptive father died in a car accident on November 1, 1987, the 22-year-old Twain put her musical career on hold and took care of her family. She and her half-brothers Mark and Darryl, and sister Carrie Ann moved to Huntsville, Ontario, where she supported them by performing at the nearby Deerhurst Resort. In 1991, she was invited to record a demo tape in Huntsville, Ontario. That led to her first recording contract with entertainment lawyer Richard Frank, whereupon she changed her name to Shania [Sha-nye-uh] an Ojibwa word which means "On my way". Twain co-wrote only one of the songs ("God Ain't Gonna Getcha for That") on her self-titled debut album. The album's first two singles, "What Made You Say That" and "Dance with the One That Brought You" peaked at #55 on the Hot Country Songs chart, while its third single, "You Lay a Whole Lot of Love on Me", failed to reach the charts. By the end of 1993 the album had sold fewer than 250,000 copies. That same year, Twain sang harmony vocals on Sammy Kershaw's Haunted Heart album. When rock producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange heard Twain's original songs and singing, he offered to produce her and to write songs with her. After many telephone conversations, they met in person at Nashville's Fan Fair in June 1993. Twain initially had no idea who he was but expressed a high degree of praise for his demos on the phone. Twain and Lange became very close within just weeks. Lange and Twain started working on a second album, and in 1995 The Woman in Me produced her first #1 single, "Any Man of Mine". The album topped the country charts for months and crossed over to mainstream charts, peaking at No. 5. As of 2007 it has sold more than 12 million copies. The Woman in Me won the Grammy Award for Best Country Album as well as the Academy of Country Music award for Album of the Year; the latter group also awarded Twain as Best New Female Vocalist. In 1997, Twain released her follow-up album, Come on Over. This was the album that would establish Twain as a successful crossover singer. Slowly, the album started racking up sales. It never hit the top spot, but with the multi-chart hit single "You're Still the One", sales skyrocketed. Other songs like "Don't Be Stupid", "Honey, I'm Home", "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", "That Don't Impress Me Much" and "From This Moment On" joined the 12 songs that eventually saw release as singles. The album stayed on the charts for the next two years and Come on Over went on to sell 20 million copies in the United States and over 34 million worldwide, making it the biggest-selling album of all time by a female musician, and the biggest-selling country album of all time. Songs from the album won four Grammy Awards over the next two years, including Best Country Song for Twain and Lange for "You're Still the One" and "Come on Over" and Best Female Country Performance for "You're Still the One" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" Despite the album's record sales it wasn't able to top the Billboard 200, reaching a peak of #2. In 1999, the "Come on Over" album was remixed for the European market as a pop album with less country instrumentation and actually gave her the big breakthrough in Europe she and her producer husband were looking for. "Come on over" went to No.1 on the UK album charts for 11 weeks. It became the biggest selling album of the year in Great Britain and a bestseller in other big European markets as well, selling more than 1 million copies in both the UK and Germany. The songs that had finally drawn European attention to the album were the pop remixed singles "That Don't Impress Me Much", a No.3 in the UK and Top 10 hit in Germany in the summer of 1999, and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" which peaked at No.3 in both the UK and France in autumn of that year. Additionally, the album set the record for the longest ever stay in the Top 20 of The US Billboard 200, remaining in the Top 20 for 99 weeks. Twain's mainstream pop acceptance was further helped by her appearance in the 1998 first edition of the VH1 Divas concert, where she sang alongside Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan and Aretha Franklin and by VH1's 1999 heavily-aired Behind the Music treatment of her, which concentrated on the tragic aspects of her early life as well as her physical attractiveness and Nashville's early resistance to her bared-midriff music videos. In 1998, Twain launched her first major concert tour, aided by her manager Jon Landau, a veteran of many large-scale tours with Bruce Springsteen. The Come on Over Tour shows were enthusiastically received by audiences around the globe and answered critics who speculated that she could not perform live. After a two year break, Twain went back into the studio, along with a management change (Twain dropped Landau and went with QPrime), and recorded her latest CD. Up! was released on November 19, 2002. About a year later, Twain kicked off the Up! Tour in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada on September 25, 2003. Up! was released as a double album, with three different "remix" discs--pop (a red CD), country (a green CD) and Indian (a blue CD). For North American markets, the pop disc was paired with the country disc and in international markets, the pop disc was paired with the Indian/Latin disc. The Indian disc was recorded in Mumbai, India. Up! was given 4 out of 5 stars by Rolling Stone magazine, and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, selling 874,000 in the first week alone. It charted at the top for five weeks. The success of the album's pop version outside the US was equally amazing when "Up!" reached No.1 in Germany, No.2 in Australia and the Top Five in the UK and France. Especially in Germany it became a real long seller, certified quadruple platinum and stayed in the Top 100 for 1 and a half years. The first single from the album, "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!", became a modest country hit in the US, but only made the Top 40 on the pop charts. It was a much bigger hit on the other side of the Atlantic, released in a pop version, the single hit the Top Five in the UK and Australia as well as the Top 15 in Germany and France. The follow-up single "Up!" reached the top 15 in the US country charts but failed to reach the pop top 40. The second European single became the mid-tempo song "Ka-Ching!,"(which was never released as a single in North America) with lyrics where Twain was criticizing unchecked consumerism. The song eventually became another smash hit in the important European markets, reaching No.1 in Germany and Austria and other European countries, the UK Top 10 and the Top 15 in France. The third single from the album would be the most successful in the US. The romantic ballad "Forever and For Always" was released as a single in April 2003 and peaked at number four on the country chart and number one on the Adult Contemporary chart, and made as well the Billboard Top 20. Again success was even bigger on the other side of the Atlantic with "Forever and For Always" again reaching the Top 10 in both, the UK and Germany. Further singles were "She's Not Just a Pretty Face" a country top-ten hit, while the last US single, "It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing", made the top 20 on both Country and AC. Due to the enormous European success of Up! and its first three singles, two more singles were released in the 2nd half of 2003 with up-tempo "Thank You Baby" (No.11 in the UK, Top 20 in Germany) and just before Christmas the romantic, acoustic ballad "When You Kiss Me", at least a minor hit in both territories. The title track "Up!" also saw a single release in a limited edition of European countries, such as Germany, in early 2004. In January 2008, Up! had sold 5.5 million copies in the U.S. (Certified by the RIAA as 11 times platinum due to the organization's rules regarding double albums, which are counted as 2 units for certifications). In 2003, Twain participated in the Dolly Parton tribute album, Just Because I'm a Woman, covering Parton's classic "Coat of Many Colors", as a duet with Alison Krauss & Union Station. The cover peaked at #57 on the Hot Country Songs charts as an album cut. During the Super Bowl XXXVII halftime show Twain performed two songs, "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" and "Up!". In 2004, she released the Greatest Hits album, with three new tracks. To date it has sold over 3.5 million copies in the U.S. The first single, the multi-format duet "Party for Two", made the country top ten with Billy Currington, while the pop version with Sugar Ray lead singer Mark McGrath made top ten in the United Kingdom and Germany. The follow-up singles, "Don't!" and "I Ain't No Quitter" didn't fare as well, the former made top twenty on Adult Contemporary, while the latter didn't gain enough airplay to even crack the Country top 40. In August 2005, when Twain hit 40, she released the single "Shoes" from the Desperate Housewives soundtrack. It only peaked at #29 on the country chart and therefore, a video, which was scheduled to be created, was cancelled. At the Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas on May 16, 2007, Twain said she was currently writing songs for a new album, and was doing a "lot of soul searching" and "indulging in the writing." When asked when her new music will come out she said "next year.", Twain is featured on the song "You Needed Me" with Canadian country star Anne Murray on Murray's duets album released November 13, 2007 in Canada, and on January 15, 2008 in the US. In the December 2007 issue of Redbook magazine, Twain is quoted as saying that she was working on a new album for 2008. Twain married music producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange on December 28, 1993. The couple have a son, Eja D'Angelo (pronounced "Asia") who was born on August 12, 2001. She and her family currently reside in Switzerland and New Zealand, where they own several horses. Twain is a vegeterian and practices a Raw Food Diet. Twain's commercial ventures outside the music industry included a series of cosmetic ads in 1999 based on "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" for Revlon. In 2005, Twain partnered with COTY for the creation of her namesake fragrance Shania by Stetson. Despite the Revlon adverts and venture into the perfume market, Twain has stated that she is uneasy about being a sex symbol and has often felt uncomfortable and stressed during photo shoots where she believes it is music that will last forever, not an image. "When I began singing I wanted to be a backing singer for Dolly Parton or Stevie Wonder, I didn't sign up to be a model or actress and didn't want fame," she has said. "For me it's all about music. Music is when I feel at my best, spiritually, emotionally and physically". According to Twain one of her beauty tips is applying an ointment known as Bag Balm that is normally applied to cow's udders during the winter months to protect it from the harsh weather. Twain has confessed to using the covering on her legs and all over her face for clear skin. In November 2005, Twain appeared on an episode of the reality show The Apprentice. In September 2007, she released a second fragrance from COTY called, "Shania Starlight". |
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