SHANIA TWAIN ARTICLES AND INTERVIEWS PAGE 6

USA TODAY
Brian Mansfield, USA Today, Feb 1999

Think Shania Twain and you think videos.

There's the black-clad splash-dancer of 'Dont Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)', the denim-vested farm girl of 'Any Man of Mine', the blond predator of 'That Dont Impress Me Much'. The clip for her biggest hit, 'You're Still the One', acknowledges her status as a music-video icon. Throughout the black-and-white fantasy she appears on a television screen — a video image.

But guess what?

"I hate being in videos," says Twain, who's released 18 of them during her three-album career, averaging a new one every three months since 1995. "But I love directing them, and I love being in the editing suite, that whole side of it."

For Twain, the exceptionally photogenic Ontario native who's nominated in six Grammy categories, the allure of the camera pales next to the rush of live performance.

"Every other aspect of my career I see as something that takes me away from what I enjoy the most, which is the stage and the songwriting," she says.

So Twain, 33, felt much more comfortable making her forthcoming television special, ' Shania Twain's Winter Break', which airs March 3 on CBS. "Basically, it's a live concert in an amphitheater setting," Twain says. The bulk of the show comes from two days of performances taped last month in Miami's Bayfront Park.

Also appearing on 'Winter Break' are the Backstreet Boys, who join her for 'From This Moment On', and Elton John, who pairs with Twain for a medley of 'Youre Still the One' and his 'Something About the Way You Look Tonight'. Twain also performs 'Amneris Letter', a number she sings on a forthcoming album of songs from John's 'Aida' musical, written with 'Evita' lyricist Tim Rice.

Twain's invitation to sing on 'Aida' came after a chance meeting with John at a radio station.

"We ran into each other in the hallway," Twain says. "He started singing 'You're Still the One' to me, right off the bat. I was so flattered that he knew who I was and that he knew my song.

"He called me up not long after and asked if I'd be interested in singing a song on this project he was putting together for 'Aida'. I said sure. I was just so taken by our meeting that I was thrilled to be asked."

While Twain may be new enough at the superstar game to be excited by John's imprimatur, her recent achievements place her in a rarified stratum. The eight-times-platinum success of 'Come on Over' makes her one of only three female singers (Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey are the others) to have two albums each pass the 8 million mark. Twain's breakthrough second album, 'The Woman in Me', has shipped 11 million units.

She has silenced doubters of her singing abilities with a tour that grossed million last year, putting her practically neck-and-neck with Garth Brooks. Her six Grammy nominations, five of which she shares with husband and collaborator Robert John "Mutt" Lange, make her country's most-nominated performer. Never before has a country singer received nominations in the Grammys' top three categories - Record, Song and Album of the Year.

For Twain, a woman who feeds off the heady thrill of possibility, having all those nominations just might be better than finding out if she's won.

"The most exciting time is from the time they're announced until the actual show," says Twain, who won the 1995 Grammy for Best Country Album for 'The Woman in Me'. "Winning is exciting, if you win, but that's not as long-lasting. It's kind of over."

Twain's success and business savvy have made her a singular force in Nashville's music industry. She even played a role in keeping Mercury Nashville, for which she records, separate from MCA Nashville during the recent Universal Music Group consolidation.

"If it hadn't been for her, there's no telling what would've happened," acknowledges Mercury Nashville president Luke Lewis. "If we hadn't had that success, they might've been inclined to do with Nashville what they did in New York and L.A. and combine the labels."

Twain's country power base may be strong, but it isn't broad. Despite her sales and Grammy recognition, she has yet to win an award from the Nashville-based Country Music Association. Some believe the oversight has less to do with her crossover appeal than with her lack of ties to the town's publishing community.

Since Twain and Lange write and produce all her material, "there hasn't been anybody here sharing in the success financially," says Lewis. "Prior to last year, there were no agents, no promoters, nobody getting a piece. That might have a little bit to do with how some people cast their votes for country music awards."

Still, she has her admirers.

"In today's environment, with the possessive attitude that radio formats take about artists, it's difficult to cross yourself over into multiple formats and continue to be successful where you started," notes CMA executive director Ed Benson. "We'd be better off as an industry if we had more people who could straddle formats. That's really the future for us."

The future for Twain includes returning from an Australian tour Friday, then playing the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo - Feb. 22, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno - Feb. 23 and the Grammys the following night. She'll play Canada in March, then in May, June and early July will perform in U.S. cities where ticket demand was highest first time around.

"It's just something of a victory lap," says Ron Baird, Twain's agent at Creative Artists Agency.

After that, she's looking forward to spending some time with Lange. Between her touring schedule and his production chores for the Backstreet Boys and others, the two often spend as much as eight weeks apart.

"It's very difficult right now," Twain says. "We've decided it's a sacrifice that we're making for the meantime, so we don't see each other hardly at all."

When the tour ends, around the Fourth of July, Twain and Lange plan to retreat to a recently purchased home near Geneva, Switzerland. They own a second home north of Miami and an estate in upstate New York they're trying to sell.

After taking the rest of July off, she hopes to start writing her next album with Lange. Though Twain keeps a notebook of ideas, she and Lange don't write during their occasional times together.

"We have to be together for more than one week to really get writing," Twain says. "It's impossible not to see each other for a whole month then get together for five or six days and expect to write anything."

She expects to start recording her next album around the end of the year, though she's considering making a Christmas record before then. The possibilities are endless — she'd like to write songs for other artists, she wants to direct videos, she might eventually even try her hand at books.

"I'd love that," she says, "to just be the creative person and not be the person in front of the camera. I would get so much more pleasure.

"I feel like a politician sometimes, because you walk out the door and you wave and smile.

"When that ends, I'm going to be fine with that. I'm not going to be somebody who wants to hold on to my fame for the rest of my life."

Description of Product
Johanna Schneller, Chatelaine, May/96

One - count it, one year ago, the only people who'd heard of Shania Twain were die-hard country music fans. Today, her albums sell by the truckload. Johanna Schneller meets the woman behind the fame

Shania Twain is back-combing my hair.

We're in her hotel suite in New York, and she's standing behind my chair. Good thing I'm sitting down: even with flat hair, next to the petite-yet-curvy Twain, I feel as big as a Santa Claus Parade float.

"You don't know how to do this?" Twain asks. Her voice is friendly and full of energy; it turns up at the end of sentences like a verbal smiley face. (She also possesses a jawline like a speedboat and melted-chocolate eyes.) "It's very easy. You just hold a handful like this, and push the comb down toward the root? Now, feel what it does to your hair." She shakes her head. "I can't believe you don't know how to back-comb."

Maybe she thinks I'm making fun of her. Certainly every aspiring country singer knows how to tease her hair into a commanding cloud - and Shania Twain, 30, has used her share of hair spray on the road from child stardom in Timmins, Ont., to smashing success in Nashville, Tenn. Or maybe she's simply so new to fame that she doesn't trust any of it.

One - count it, one year ago, the only people who knew Twain's music were die-hard back-combers. But that was before her second album, The Woman in Me, sold one million copies here and six million copies worldwide. That was before she swept the Canadian Country Music Awards last September, winning five honors including best album, best single ("Any Man of Mine") and top female vocalist. That was before she sang for President Clinton at a November gala, and before she danced on a float with a giant turkey in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. That was before she was named best new vocalist at the American Music Awards in January, won a Grammy for best country album in February and was nominated for seven Juno Awards. Says Cliff Dumas, morning deejay on CISS FM, Canada's biggest New Country radio station, "Anne Murray cracked the door to success in America. Michelle Wright wedged it a little more. Shania blew it wide open."

Now, here she is, on the verge of eternal fame - and on the island of Manhattan - to shoot the video for a rompin', stompin', drum-heavy tune called "If You're Not in it for Love, I'm Outta Here!" She's waiting for her wardrobe woman to arrive with the pair of black velvet, lace-front, bell-bottom hip-huggers made to Twain's specifications during a five-hour fitting. The pants were cut too low; emergency procedures were performed with spandex. The reconfigured pants fit like the skin of a sleek seal.

Still, five hours for a pair of bell-bottoms? "Before, the pants didn't work for Shania," says her publicist, Patty Lou Andrews. "Now, they work." Shania Twain always knew what she wanted. These days, she knows how to get it.

In the caramel-colored marble lobby of a Manhattan courthouse, Twain winks at a large camera that zooms around her on a U-shaped track like an oversize model train. She's wearing The Pants, plus a red chenille cropped turtleneck (Twain loves to wear black, red or white) and an expanse of flat stomach. "This is the midriff year," she says, laughing. "Who knows what it will be next year? I hate my legs, so I'll never have a leg year."

Welcome to the land of New Country, where midriffs abound and cryin' is passé. Though they still twang with traditional steel guitars and fiddles, Twain's songs - all of which she writes or cowrites with her husband, top record producer Robert John (Mutt) Lange - are more about strength than weakness. Equal parts femininity and feminism (as in "The Woman in Me": But I can't always be/the rock that you see), they strike a '90s chord with both women and men. When a guy cheats in Twain's song "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?," does she beg him to come back? Oh, no. She sashays out the door in a slinky red dress, smiling.

Twain's songs may be jauntier than New Country king Garth Brooks's (he tackles modern themes like spousal abuse and single parenting). Still, an iron thread of authenticity runs through her music. She's able to joke about heartbreak because she's already survived much worse.

At the video shoot's dinner break, when everyone else is chowing down on Chinese takeout, Twain sneaks off to her trailer with a plate of rice. Just rice. She's been a vegetarian for two years. "If I ever get fat because I eat too much? I couldn't be satisfied with myself," she says. "Because I would think, 'There's extra pounds on me, and there's kids out there that....' I sure could have left a little, and not consumed it myself. When I make dinner, I'm perfect at just making enough. My husband says, 'What are you trying to do, starve me?' But it's the mind-set of my childhood, the grooves that end up in your brain."

Because it has a happy ending, Twain's childhood now reads like the stuff of country legend. But it didn't seem romantic back in Timmins. Gerald Twain was an Ojibwa forester; he and his wife, Sharon, raised five kids (Shania, who was then called Eilleen, was the second-oldest). There was never enough money.

"In my house," Twain says, "it was so wrong to take more than your share. If you decided to take an extra potato, someone didn't get a potato at all." She remembers gasping when a visiting friend poured herself a whole glass of milk. "To us, eating like that was only on TV."

At age 3, little Eilleen started harmonizing to the country music the Twains played on the radio, inventing parts that weren't there. When she was 8, her parents would wake her at 1 a.m. so she could sing in clubs after they stopped serving liquor. Twain dreamed of records, radio and Nashville. The family cut corners to buy her a microphone, sheet music, stage outfits.

Twain hid her poverty from her friends at school. "I did a good job too. But you know what? I recognized as a kid that I wasn't the worst off. My mother had a lot of pride. We never went to school dirty or in ripped clothes. I always think of 'Coat of Many Colors,' the Dolly Parton song? So when I would see another kid that was dirty, I knew they didn't have the loving parents I had."

That's why Twain feels no resentment toward her parents for encouraging her to work (they counted on her income, which soon approached theirs). "They weren't living vicariously through me or anything like that. I think the only desperation was to have a child that succeeded," she says. "It's like, if you have an Olympic athlete for a child, you are going to bite your fingers to the bone, wanting that child to succeed."

Her parents never got to see a Shania Twain record. When she was 22, they died suddenly when their car crashed into a logging truck. Twain became surrogate mother to her three younger siblings, and sang wherever she could earn money, including a three-year stint doing six shows a week at the Deerhurst Resort near Muskoka, Ont. She changed her first name to Shania, an Ojibwa word that means "on my way." When her siblings felt ready to go their separate ways in 1991, she headed to Nashville. Two years later, her billboards were towering over the streets.

And now, she has it all: a record company that begs her to tour (maybe spring 1997?). Fans waiting in airports with armfuls of photos and CDs for her to sign. A 1,200-hectare lakeside estate in upstate New York's Adirondack Mountains. A fairy-tale romance that started when Mutt (who has produced records for, among others, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard and Michael Bolton) spotted a-naturally-midriff-baring Twain in her first video, "What Made You Say That?," from her 1993 debut album, Shania Twain, and phoned her management company. (Thinking he was just a fan, they tried to send him away with an autographed photo.)

Twain and Lange began writing songs together long-distance, then fell in love on a working trip - in Spain. "Looking at him the day I fell in love, and looking at him the day before? Two different things," Twain says. (Sounds like song lyrics to me.) They married in December 1993, six months after they met. That's another thing Twain has: a 2.5-carat diamond ring winking on her finger. Lange proposed in Paris; he flew Twain's sisters there to keep her company while he worked in the studio. And let's not forget the velvet pants.

What Twain won't forget, however, is that a few short years ago she was kneeling over a cold river to wash her family's laundry when their well went dry and she couldn't afford to bring the clothes to a laundromat. "That's a part of me I want to try and keep. I think it keeps things in perspective. It keeps you from expecting too much and being let down," she says.

Let down. Twain knows about being let down so well that she's erected a bit of an unconscious barrier between herself and her success. At a party in Nashville to celebrate her first platinum record, champagne was flowing, people were shouting their congratulations. But it was only when she saw it on TV days later that she thought, "Wow, I enjoyed that night. That was fun. And I kind of celebrated it again, almost for real."

When I ask, "So have you had a moment where you realized that you have everything you've worked for and dreamed about?" she says no. "I don't know why that is. I'm just so focused when I'm doing things, I've just got so much to do...."

As a kid, Twain's big Nashville dream was touchingly simple: she wanted nothing more than to bump into her hero Dolly Parton, queen of the back-comb. A few years ago, she did. Twain was humming one of her own tunes to herself on an airplane, and Parton, who was on the flight, asked her what the tune was. But Twain was too shy to answer. "My one chance to talk to Dolly Parton and I didn't take it! But I want to know her. I definitely want to know her at some point." Her voice is strong with resolve. I have no doubt they will meet again.