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ON A ROLL

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She was singing in bars at age 8. She lived for Supertramp. And she married the world’s most successful hair-metal producer. So how on Earth did Shania Twain become a country superstar who lives in an Oprah-sized Swiss château and entertains billions at the Super Bowl? “I work harder than anyone I know!” she explains.

By Adrian Deevoy
Blender, April 2003

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"I’ve never actually seen cocaine,” Shania Twain muses as her luxury car swings up into Beverly Hills. “I know what it looks like, obviously, but I have yet to physically see it.”

For that reason alone, Twain is one of the most unusual musicians you’re ever likely to meet. “Although I did get high once,” she says — but before you can imagine the country diva (a term she loathes) sparking up a pipe in a burned-out crack den, she shoots down the illusion in its own flames. “It was at the dentist.”

Even if Twain were predisposed to enjoying the occasional snort — and clearly, she is not — you can be certain that she would never spare the minutes required to do so. She is a brisk woman who wastes neither time nor words. When asked to describe herself in one word, she opts for impatient. She tells you this while marching ahead of her entourage, the sooner to sign some autographs, get photographed, take a phone call, make some minor design decisions and get into the vehicle that will take her to her next album-hustling appointment. This entire maneuver takes a little over two minutes, but Shania Twain is on the campaign trail — and you’re either on the bus or you aren’t, buddy.

It has been six years since Come On Over, 1997’s 34 million – selling phenomenon, and Twain is back in the driver’s seat. Now the mother of a 1-year-old son, Eja D’Angelo, and a resident of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland (where she and her husband, producer and collaborator Robert John “Mutt” Lange, own a classic French château), she has a new record — the exclamation point – festooned Up! — to promote, and an itinerary that would make many a road-hardened nü-metal band quietly wet its big black shorts.

Her aggressive ambition and absolute career-consciousness hasn’t always won her friends. Managers have walked out on account of her ruthless attitude. Her younger brother Darryl once described her as a “robot.” Steve Earle once called her “the world’s highest-paid lap dancer.” (Which is rich, coming from a guy who looks like the world’s lowest-paid bartender.) But a friend of 11 years sums up Twain best when he warns, “You won’t be the first or last to have been frustrated by her enigma.”

* * * * *

Shania Twain is, by her own admission, Canadian. “We have a sense of neutrality and open-mindedness,” she says. “We’re friendly, but we’re not going to open up and tell our life story to the guy sitting beside us. It’s not our nature.”

Over a vegetarian lunch at the secluded Hotel Bel Air, Twain talks about music and begins to loosen up slightly. The first album she bought with her own money, she says, was Supertramp’s Even in the Quietest Moments. Blender tells her that’s funny, as her recent single “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!” was likened in these pages to the sound of Pink jamming with the beardy prog-rock combo — albeit “in a really good way.” “That’s cool,” she says. “I loved Supertramp.”

Though she would emerge as a country artist, the soundtrack of her youth was something she insists on calling “the rock.” “It was always the rock,” she enthuses. “The first concert I saw was Ted Nugent in Toronto, and I had a major thing about Bryan Adams and David Lee Roth. I didn’t even get into the art school – type thing — R.E.M. and all those bands — because I was so into the rock. AC/DC, man. The rock.”

Besides the rock, her true love was writing songs, which she still does almost every day. Some songs are small and fragile, too personal to play publicly (“even to my family”), while others are the brash and breezy anthems we have come to associate with the all-conquering Shania Twain brand.

These songs are so comfortable and conversational that even when Twain is ordering food, she sounds as if she’s road-testing new titles. “Bring it all at once,” she declares. “Put it right there. I’ll take it as it comes.” She says “That doesn’t impress me” more than once while discussing the trappings of success, and, at one point during lunch, she asks the waiter for a glass of water. That’s pretty unremarkable, until you realize that she recently wrote a song about sexual jealousy entitled, yep, “Waiter! Bring Me Water!”

But you cannot talk about Twain’s songwriting without mentioning Mutt Lange. Her elusive other half is somewhere in the hotel today but will not be joining his wife in her promotional role, as he hasn’t spoken to the press in more than 20 years.

Lange possesses an exceptional track record as the extremely hands-on producer of some landmark albums, including AC/DC’s Back in Black, Foreigner’s 4, Def Leppard’s Hysteria and Twain’s three most recent blockbusters. In many ways, he defined the sound of rock radio, but apart from his fondness for horrible shirts and his ’80s enormo-hair, we know very little about him. Such is his phobia of publicity, rumors claim he bought all existing photos of himself. “Not true,” says his wife. “Even people who know us believe that, but it never happened.”

“Mutt has huge ears,” Bryan Adams said shortly after recording his 1996 album, 18 Til I Die, with Lange. By this he meant that Lange has great aural capacity, not large lugs (although the few available photos suggest that he does, in fact, have a mighty set of flaps). “He listens to a guitar like it was an orchestra.”

“The real shock about Mutt is that he’s a very regular guy,” says Luke Lewis, who runs Mercury Nashville, the label for which Twain records, and who counts himself a good friend of Lange’s. “He loves history and politics and soccer. I remember around the time of [Twain’s 1995 CD] The Woman in Me asking him to do an interview, and he said, ‘No way. I’ve come this far without doing any — why start now?’”

Some would argue that the 54-year-old Lange’s high-shine production squeezes all the life from the music he creates, but Twain leaps to his defense. She laughs out loud when the theory is put forth that the real secret of Twain and Lange (the Twangs, if you like) is that they take the most critically disparaged, uncool, mass-market music of the past 15 years — hair metal, disco, Europop, Garth Brooks – era country — and combine them in almost every song.

“I guess that makes sense,” Twain acknowledges with a smile. “What you hear is the collaboration between the two of us. As a producer, Mutt wants to make music that is succinct and sensible. He is an instrument, his whole physical being. It’s hard to explain.” But to return briefly to the rock: Whenever young Shania listened to AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love Into You,” did she ever think, “Mmm, I’ll marry that big, hairy producer one day”?

“I must say it never really crossed my mind,” she chuckles. “Isn’t that strange?”

* * * * *

Shania Twain’s 37 years have not only been strange but also suffused with great sadness. To understand her at all you must take into account her extraordinary past. “I lost my innocence too early,” she says. “Too much happened.”

It is often said that her life story would make a fine, weepy country song, something George Jones might get his tear ducts around. But even Nashville’s hardest hack would have trouble with a few of its more heartrending twists.

Picture a small, gap-toothed girl named Eileen Edwards from Timmins, Ontario. You would never have noticed her if she didn’t have a singing voice as big and bold as the Rockies. Her real father had left, and her mother, Sharon, remarried an Ojibwa Indian named Jerry Twain, whom the talented youngster adored. “We’d go snaring rabbits together,” she remembers with a smile before sensibly adding, “Of course, I wasn’t a vegetarian then.”

But work was scarce, and the family often lived below the poverty line. In winter, Twain and her three siblings wrapped their feet in plastic bags to stop the cold and wet from getting through the rubber boots they shared. “People say there’s a nobility in being poor,” she says. “But when you don’t have a winter coat…well, you don’t want to go back there.” Sometimes they had mustard sandwiches for lunch; sometimes they had nothing at all. Twain remembers her sister Carrie-Ann was once reduced to taking month-old buns to the school picnic. “As a child, you really felt the pressure,” she adds solemnly. “But we all made it look as though we were OK.”

Yet her mother was overbearingly ambitious and pinned all her hopes on her oldest daughter’s God-given gift. At age 8, Eileen was singing standards in local bars most evenings; by 13 she was the family’s main breadwinner, working the cash register at a drive-through McDonald’s. Meanwhile, aside from her unquenchable passion for music, normal teenage life passed her by.

She made tapes that were rejected; she joined bands and left them. But the bar work remained a constant source of income, and Eileen was confident that one day she would make it. “All I wanted was to make a living out of music,” she recalls. “And I knew that I could if I worked hard enough.” Then in 1987, her mother and stepfather were in in a head-on collision with a fully loaded logging truck. Both were killed instantly.

Twain’s speech slows as she talks of this time and its effect on her. “It took away a lot of choices,” she says deliberately. “I don’t know if I would’ve been as driven if it hadn’t happened. People say I’m ambitious, but I had to…survive.”

Only 21, Eileen moved the family, of whom she was now the principal guardian, and took a job singing in a Vegas-style revue in Deerhurst, Ontario. It was soul-destroying work, but the money was good, and she had mouths to feed. Home for the Twains was now a cabin with no running water.

Then a Nashville lawyer came to hear her perform, and everything began to change. A demo, a couple of lucky breaks and some shameless networking secured Eileen a $20,000 advance and a record deal. She changed her name to Shania, which means “I’m on my way” in Ojibwa, and relocated temporarily to Nashville.

After receiving several long-distance phone calls from a man introducing himself as Mutt, Twain agreed to meet her mysterious caller. The man with the canine nickname turned out to be Robert John Lange: songwriting giant, sonic architect and the most successful record producer of his generation.

They wrote together, fell in love, married and, in their spare time, began work on gleaming pop-country/arena rock records full of chatty lyrics, hook-riddled tunes and elephantine choruses. Recognizing that farmers have satellite dishes too, Twain made music videos that redefined the rules of Nashville and introduced the world to the novel concept of the Sexy Country Chick. The Woman in Me sold 12 million copies, and Come On Over became the best-selling record ever by a female artist. Her hometown built a Shania shrine. She moved to Switzerland — nextdoor to Phil Collins on Lake Geneva — and lived, like a fairy princess, happily ever after.

“Something like that,” Twain acknowledges. “I have worked harder than virtually anyone I know.”

“You pray for an artist who will work as hard as Shania does,” says Luke Lewis. “She works so hard it’s fucking insane.”

* * * * *

Welcome to the wealthiest trailer park on the planet. Elton John is nextdoor. Mariah Carey is staying directly opposite, her front door just three steps away. Nickelback are across the road from Matchbox Twenty, and Justin Timberlake is at the end of the street. There he is now, sitting on his stoop. And hold on, isn’t that Tim McGraw?

We are in Los Angeles, in the backstage Winnebago village at the thirtieth annual American Music Awards, where the performers’ enclosure is bustling with all manner of curious celebrity life.

Before long, the stellar neighbors start to socialize. The Osbournes, who are emceeing the show, pop into John’s place for afternoon tea. The rock bands intermingle until you cannot tell one musician from another. Nelly strolls down the mini – main drag with full posse in tow. Faith Hill comes over to greet Twain but doesn’t stay long.

In the midst of all this promiscuous activity, Twain retains an almost regal distance from her fellow entertainers, venturing out only once, to see Willie Nelson in his tour bus. She visits him discreetly and offers no details.

For their part, Twain’s peers treat her with a cool respect. She is plainly not one of them, but hell, she must be doing something right. Nelly nods his approval; Kelly Osbourne offers a shy wave. A passing drummer watches her go by and mutters, “I’m gonna getcha wood.”

Back inside her trailer, Twain is undergoing the first of this afternoon’s four costume changes. Stylists fret and makeup flies as she’s shoehorned into the latest creations from Paris, clothes that denote a more mature, high-end move away from her familiar leopard-print pantsuits of yore.

Momentarily oblivious to her new sartorial direction, Twain is worrying about her security guards. “There are too many of them,” she announces. “They keep telling people to get out of the way when they aren’t even in my way. It’s just frigging embarrassing. There are, like, 50 percent too many security guys.” Someone politely points out that she has only two guards. “Then it’s one too many,” she decides.

Her obligations for the day done, Twain heads back to her hotel chalet, where she’ll put her baby to bed and spend the evening with her husband “probably talking about soccer and hockey.” In order not to waste a valuable Shania second, our car’s journeys to and from engagements are used as gentle interview therapy.

Shania Twain is a complex creation: an impoverished Canadian country singer who lives like a Swiss banker, an AC/DC fan whose songs sound like ABBA, a sex symbol who shows little interest in sex, an artist whose lyrics touch millions but tell us little about herself.

In an attempt to better understand her, Blender gamely fires questions, and Twain politely responds — although you get the sense she would prefer to be undergoing intricate dentistry. Without the Novocaine this time.

Would you agree that you are a difficult read, a closed book?

“I can be,” she says, shrugging offhandedly. “It depends on who I’m dealing with. I wouldn’t want people to think that I was complicated or hung up, but I just don’t walk around chatting my little head off. You could sit with me in a car for an hour and I wouldn’t say a word, but…I can have fun.”

When was the last time you were truly reckless?

“I don’t think ever. I just don’t have it in me to let go. I couldn’t be so irresponsible. Because I started in music so young, I’ve seen many adults drunk and violent, and I cannot be that.”

Was it hurtful when your brother called you a “robot” in the tabloids?

“Very. I think he may have been pressured into it. The press can be very good at picking on vulnerable people, and I think they caught him. The whole family was upset. But it slowly healed itself.”

You’re not a particularly sexual person, are you?

“I don’t want to be sexual. I don’t mind celebrating my womanhood, but…I developed so early. I wasn’t ready. I strapped my chest down for years. I was singing in clubs from age 8, and there were a lot of drunk men, and…they don’t know how old you are.”

There has been a lot made of the fact that you and Mutt adhere to Sant Mat, the Eastern religion.

“Well, there’ve been some silly things written, like Mutt and I don’t believe in having sex. But that’s not true, basically.”

Have you given a lot of money to an Indian man with a beard?

“No. I seek spiritual truth. I believe in meditation, but that’s it.”

Have you heard the joke that meditation is better than sitting around doing nothing?

“There you go.”

* * * * *

In a beige television studio in Burbank, a familiar chin appears from around the corner, followed sometime later by the rest of Jay Leno. The genial host wants to greet tonight’s musical guest, but her dressing-room door is firmly closed. Shania Twain, he is informed, is in a business meeting. “But these are simple country folk,” a puzzled Leno muses, knocking anyway. “Surely they don’t have business meetings.”

When they speak, Leno notes that he’s intrigued by the ingenious format of Up! The new album comes in three versions: pop, country and Asian-influenced. Twain has prosaically dubbed them Red, Green and Blue, but Blender prefers the catchier Hollywood, Dollywood and Bollywood. “I’m in a kinda country mood today,” Leno tells no one in particular.

Nicole Kidman, on hand to plug The Hours, courteously taps a foot as Twain and her band techno-boogie through Up!’s contagious title track, but deep down, the elegant Australian seems more of an indie girl. Both leave the studio before they get a chance to have the big Supertramp vs. Supergrass debate.

“She seemed very charming,” Twain decides, sitting upright in the back seat. “And so tall!”

Blender tells Twain that Kidman was known as “Stalky” as a kid on account of her fishing-pole physique. For the first time in days, Twain softens. “Oh, really,” she says thoughtfully. “That would explain a lot.”

In the car as dusk falls, Twain sings along to a sad Etta James song playing on the radio. It is the most beautifully melancholic duet.

“I knew too much way too young,” she says again as we finally arrive. “I’m sad that it happened, but I believe there was a reason for it all. And I guess” — she gestures to the luxury car, the secluded hotel and, lastly, herself — “this is the reason.”

Pop Quiz!

What does Shania Twain look for in a man? In a hard-rock frontman? In an olive? Her mysteries plumbed, and then some…

AC/DC singer: Brian Johnson or Bon Scott?   Brian Johnson.

Looks or humor?   Humor.

Saddle or bareback?   Bareback.

Looking or seeing?   Seeing.

Leopard-print or zebra skin?   Leopard.

Neil Young or Bob Dylan?   Bob Dylan. Neil Young is great, though. Argh!

Left turn or right turn?   Hmm, deep. Left.

Black olives or green olives?   Green.

Luxury or comfort?   Comfort, every time.

Sinatra or Presley?   Elvis.

To play you in the movie:   Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts? Julia Roberts.

Electric or acoustic?   Acoustic.

Kissing or hugging?   Hugging.

Rags or riches?   Riches. If you’ve ever been in rags, you know it’s something you don’t ever want again.

Reason to live in Switzerland: the slim chance of war or the proximity to Phil Collins?   Oh, my! It’s gotta be Phil.

Cash or charge?   Cash.

Korn or Audioslave?   Korn.

Do you want fries with that?   Yes, please.

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