Raider
11-16-2002, 2:10pm
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035774392525&call_pageid=968867495754&col=969483191630
What made her say that?
Singer Shania Twain says she doesn't like being a star
GREG QUILL
"I'd love not to be in the spotlight," says Shania Twain, whose re-entry into the pop music market after a couple of years off is getting the kind of media attention you'd expect for an extraterrestrial visitation.
When the juggernaut fuelled by her 35-million-selling third album, Come On Over, slowed down, Twain, 37, took a break to bear her first child and to write and record the next opus.
The lavish Up!, which contains both country and pop versions of all 19 songs, is due out Tuesday.
"I don't like being a star it's not natural for me," she continues, her black eyes flashing earnestly from beneath her peaked cloth cap. She's perching on a big easy chair in a vast beige suite in the Windsor Arms Hotel.
This is the woman whose pouting butt cheeks and bare belly have graced the walls of a squillion smelly male sanctuaries, whose wiggle once prompted country-rock singer-songwriter Steve Earle to refer to her as "the highest-paid lap dancer in country music," whose videos and hit records stick like sugar magnets to radio and TV playlists, who last week opened the Country Music Awards TV special in Nashville with a jaw-dropping exhibition of raw and impudent rock 'n' roll sass, whose every new burp is scrutinized by 24-hour-a-day coverage on Country Music Television and echoes across all media lines.
This gray afternoon Twain is holding court for local scribblers while a two-camera crew for the American VH1 music video channel records her every move, gesture and bon mot.
The crossover country-pop diva, by any measure one of the most popular and successful female stars in history, is even holding a camera herself, trained on yours truly, when the interview begins.
She's not about to be intimidated.
This is Twain's way of seizing control, a trait to which she readily confesses.
She tried to make it impossible for anyone to listen to Up! prior to its release, citing fears of Internet downloading. It smacked of media manipulation.
Everything in Twain's life has been picked over relentlessly by the press in recent years her impoverished origins in Timmins; her Pygmalion-esque relationship with native Canadian classical musician and conductor John Kim Bell; the death of her mother and native stepfather in a collision with a logging truck and her subsequent efforts to provide for her siblings; her tenure as an unknown star-in-residence at the American-owned Deerhurst Inn resort north of Toronto; her marriage in 1997 to veteran South African producer Jeff "Mutt" Lange; and her partnership in one of the most profitable songwriting and recording franchises in pop history.
So a ban on playing the new album for the media would have reduced conversation prospects to the Lange/Twain chβteau in Switzerland and their child, Eja. Which is probably just what Twain would have preferred.
But common sense prevails strengthened by the suggestion that selling musical art unheard is not unlike selling canned goods unlabelled and an anxious record company representative pipes a few radio-friendly tracks of the new album into an adjacent bedroom, where reporters hang like bait on a hook. The audio quickie at least gives the ensuing conversation a shape, a purpose.
But no sooner does it begin than Twain drops this bombshell about not wanting to be a star.
"I'm not saying I have any regrets, but at some point I know I'll leave it all behind," she adds. "I don't need it."
Well, of course not. Not now.
If you add up what Twain has earned as a performer and songwriter royalties from the sale of more than 35 million albums, airplay royalties for a similar number of minutes on radio and TV, the box office take on a three-year international stadium tour, and fees for appearances on every major network in the world your head will ache.
But the conclusion will be unavoidable: There's precious little she could possibly need, nothing she couldn't buy.
Except anonymity, she says.
"I wanted success, security, a future after my parents died. I had no one to fall back on, no one to impress, like other 20 year olds do.
"I couldn't go home, couldn't ask them for help with a mortgage or money to go to university.
"I just didn't know you could do it without singing. All I wanted was to write songs. I've been doing that since I was a kid. My big ambition was to be a backup singer for Stevie Wonder. Honest.
"I'd have been happy just to write and produce and not have to talk to anyone, like Mutt. But back then I didn't know how to do that.
"The only way I could get my songs heard was to record them and sing them myself. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to go for it with everything I had or wait for another idea. I didn't have that luxury.
"But I never saw myself getting this big," says Twain, who prefers living in Switzerland, "because, like Canadians, Europeans are reserved in the right ways, more respectful of your privacy, and so much more versatile than Americans, who are invasive and overexcited by fame."
These admissions go some way toward explaining why Twain has confused and infuriated country music purists.
The new album a collection of bright and simple, hook-heavy and elaborately arranged songs that conjure up memories of prominent musical styles from the 1960s through the 1990s will do nothing to convince them she's not an interloper, a popster who appropriated the roots genre for her own purposes and bent it out of shape.
Written during the couple's travels through Europe and recorded in Ireland, Italy and the Caribbean wherever the best studio musicians felt comfortable Up! is, in fact, two CDs, a green one for country music fans and a red one for those with pop and rock tastes. Vocals, bass and drum parts are the same on both versions, Twain explains.
"But the instrumentation is different. It's acoustic guitars, banjos and mandolins on the green CD, and electric guitars and keyboards and a bigger drum sound on the red one."
There's a third version, too, a blue CD featuring the same 19 songs with "Asian influences and dance mixes," she says. "It will be available in Europe, packaged with the red CD."
"Blue" versions of some songs will be available for downloading on the Web site http://www.umusic.com.
You could say it's cut-and-paste music by an ambitious and canny marketer whom many see as a cut-and-paste performer, one incapable of commitment to a particular style or artistic imperative.
She's a kind of Shania kit, offering herself in whatever form or musical clothes potential buyers favour.
That suggestion gets her back up.
"Why do you say that?" she demands. "I don't see any difference between what I'm doing with this album and another artist performing different versions of the same song, like Eric Clapton did with `Layla' one hard rock and the other acoustic folk."
That those versions were recorded 30 years apart, punctuated dramatic shifts in Clapton's life and artistic outlook, and reconfirmed his complex relationship with a multi-generational audience, can't be dismissed as just clever marketing, I try to say.
But Twain's determined to cut this line of questioning short. She's well prepared.
"Besides, with the last record, I was playing catch-up," she continues.
"I had to trust other people to do different mixes for different formats after the fact. This time, it's not an afterthought. I have control over the process. I like every kind of music. I grew up in a town with one radio station, where you'd hear country, rock, disco and r 'n' b and folk all in a single program."
As for the purist naysayers, Twain sneers playfully: "As if I care ...
"Look, I know I push the country music envelope, but so have most of the country artists I love Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. The purists didn't like them at first either. I'm not a purist. I'm just trying to find a place where my music fits.
"And when you get down to it, I'm as country as it gets. I know traditional country artists better than most of the country singers who put me down.
"You'll never hear any of these new guys singing politically incorrect songs like `Take This Job And Shove It!' like Johnny Paycheck did in the 1970s, or women singing about abortion, like Dolly did.
"Those songs were their identities. I lived and breathed those songs. I'm the real deal.
"I'm no cowgirl. ... Hell, I'm a bush girl, and that's much tougher!"
What made her say that?
Singer Shania Twain says she doesn't like being a star
GREG QUILL
"I'd love not to be in the spotlight," says Shania Twain, whose re-entry into the pop music market after a couple of years off is getting the kind of media attention you'd expect for an extraterrestrial visitation.
When the juggernaut fuelled by her 35-million-selling third album, Come On Over, slowed down, Twain, 37, took a break to bear her first child and to write and record the next opus.
The lavish Up!, which contains both country and pop versions of all 19 songs, is due out Tuesday.
"I don't like being a star it's not natural for me," she continues, her black eyes flashing earnestly from beneath her peaked cloth cap. She's perching on a big easy chair in a vast beige suite in the Windsor Arms Hotel.
This is the woman whose pouting butt cheeks and bare belly have graced the walls of a squillion smelly male sanctuaries, whose wiggle once prompted country-rock singer-songwriter Steve Earle to refer to her as "the highest-paid lap dancer in country music," whose videos and hit records stick like sugar magnets to radio and TV playlists, who last week opened the Country Music Awards TV special in Nashville with a jaw-dropping exhibition of raw and impudent rock 'n' roll sass, whose every new burp is scrutinized by 24-hour-a-day coverage on Country Music Television and echoes across all media lines.
This gray afternoon Twain is holding court for local scribblers while a two-camera crew for the American VH1 music video channel records her every move, gesture and bon mot.
The crossover country-pop diva, by any measure one of the most popular and successful female stars in history, is even holding a camera herself, trained on yours truly, when the interview begins.
She's not about to be intimidated.
This is Twain's way of seizing control, a trait to which she readily confesses.
She tried to make it impossible for anyone to listen to Up! prior to its release, citing fears of Internet downloading. It smacked of media manipulation.
Everything in Twain's life has been picked over relentlessly by the press in recent years her impoverished origins in Timmins; her Pygmalion-esque relationship with native Canadian classical musician and conductor John Kim Bell; the death of her mother and native stepfather in a collision with a logging truck and her subsequent efforts to provide for her siblings; her tenure as an unknown star-in-residence at the American-owned Deerhurst Inn resort north of Toronto; her marriage in 1997 to veteran South African producer Jeff "Mutt" Lange; and her partnership in one of the most profitable songwriting and recording franchises in pop history.
So a ban on playing the new album for the media would have reduced conversation prospects to the Lange/Twain chβteau in Switzerland and their child, Eja. Which is probably just what Twain would have preferred.
But common sense prevails strengthened by the suggestion that selling musical art unheard is not unlike selling canned goods unlabelled and an anxious record company representative pipes a few radio-friendly tracks of the new album into an adjacent bedroom, where reporters hang like bait on a hook. The audio quickie at least gives the ensuing conversation a shape, a purpose.
But no sooner does it begin than Twain drops this bombshell about not wanting to be a star.
"I'm not saying I have any regrets, but at some point I know I'll leave it all behind," she adds. "I don't need it."
Well, of course not. Not now.
If you add up what Twain has earned as a performer and songwriter royalties from the sale of more than 35 million albums, airplay royalties for a similar number of minutes on radio and TV, the box office take on a three-year international stadium tour, and fees for appearances on every major network in the world your head will ache.
But the conclusion will be unavoidable: There's precious little she could possibly need, nothing she couldn't buy.
Except anonymity, she says.
"I wanted success, security, a future after my parents died. I had no one to fall back on, no one to impress, like other 20 year olds do.
"I couldn't go home, couldn't ask them for help with a mortgage or money to go to university.
"I just didn't know you could do it without singing. All I wanted was to write songs. I've been doing that since I was a kid. My big ambition was to be a backup singer for Stevie Wonder. Honest.
"I'd have been happy just to write and produce and not have to talk to anyone, like Mutt. But back then I didn't know how to do that.
"The only way I could get my songs heard was to record them and sing them myself. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to go for it with everything I had or wait for another idea. I didn't have that luxury.
"But I never saw myself getting this big," says Twain, who prefers living in Switzerland, "because, like Canadians, Europeans are reserved in the right ways, more respectful of your privacy, and so much more versatile than Americans, who are invasive and overexcited by fame."
These admissions go some way toward explaining why Twain has confused and infuriated country music purists.
The new album a collection of bright and simple, hook-heavy and elaborately arranged songs that conjure up memories of prominent musical styles from the 1960s through the 1990s will do nothing to convince them she's not an interloper, a popster who appropriated the roots genre for her own purposes and bent it out of shape.
Written during the couple's travels through Europe and recorded in Ireland, Italy and the Caribbean wherever the best studio musicians felt comfortable Up! is, in fact, two CDs, a green one for country music fans and a red one for those with pop and rock tastes. Vocals, bass and drum parts are the same on both versions, Twain explains.
"But the instrumentation is different. It's acoustic guitars, banjos and mandolins on the green CD, and electric guitars and keyboards and a bigger drum sound on the red one."
There's a third version, too, a blue CD featuring the same 19 songs with "Asian influences and dance mixes," she says. "It will be available in Europe, packaged with the red CD."
"Blue" versions of some songs will be available for downloading on the Web site http://www.umusic.com.
You could say it's cut-and-paste music by an ambitious and canny marketer whom many see as a cut-and-paste performer, one incapable of commitment to a particular style or artistic imperative.
She's a kind of Shania kit, offering herself in whatever form or musical clothes potential buyers favour.
That suggestion gets her back up.
"Why do you say that?" she demands. "I don't see any difference between what I'm doing with this album and another artist performing different versions of the same song, like Eric Clapton did with `Layla' one hard rock and the other acoustic folk."
That those versions were recorded 30 years apart, punctuated dramatic shifts in Clapton's life and artistic outlook, and reconfirmed his complex relationship with a multi-generational audience, can't be dismissed as just clever marketing, I try to say.
But Twain's determined to cut this line of questioning short. She's well prepared.
"Besides, with the last record, I was playing catch-up," she continues.
"I had to trust other people to do different mixes for different formats after the fact. This time, it's not an afterthought. I have control over the process. I like every kind of music. I grew up in a town with one radio station, where you'd hear country, rock, disco and r 'n' b and folk all in a single program."
As for the purist naysayers, Twain sneers playfully: "As if I care ...
"Look, I know I push the country music envelope, but so have most of the country artists I love Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. The purists didn't like them at first either. I'm not a purist. I'm just trying to find a place where my music fits.
"And when you get down to it, I'm as country as it gets. I know traditional country artists better than most of the country singers who put me down.
"You'll never hear any of these new guys singing politically incorrect songs like `Take This Job And Shove It!' like Johnny Paycheck did in the 1970s, or women singing about abortion, like Dolly did.
"Those songs were their identities. I lived and breathed those songs. I'm the real deal.
"I'm no cowgirl. ... Hell, I'm a bush girl, and that's much tougher!"