“Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” by Shania Twain, Sunday, August 4, 2024
Shania Twain’s third album Come On Over holds a Guinness World Record for the biggest-selling studio album by a solo female artist with over 40 million copies sold. Unless physical media makes a massive comeback, even Taylor Swift will probably not beat that record. With a staggering 12 singles released from the record to country and pop radio, the album has been inescapable since its release in 1997. Twain’s first album failed to chart a top 40 country single but caught the attention of legendary hard rock producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange who helped to popularize AC/DC and introduced the world to the imperial period of Def Leppard. Lange produced Twain’s second album The Woman in Me which was a huge success on Country radio with 4 number 1- singles. The album pales in comparison to Come on Over with 3 singles reaching number 1 on the country charts and 3 singles reaching the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100.
LET’S GO GIRLS! Crediting Mutt Lange to Shania Twain’s massive success has unfortunately been much of mansplained music commentary on the topic. Twain’s success certainly needed an extra push from a famous producer to bring her music to the masses, but at the core were ideas Shania brought through her own experience as a songwriter. InTwain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Ontario, Canada where she grew up. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother remarried Jerry Twain, who adopted Shania and changed her surname. The family was poor. At eight, Shania began singing in bars between midnight and 1 a.m. for customers finishing their drinks after the bar stopped serving. The $20 she earned each night she gave to her family to pay the bills. While she hated playing for drunk patrons, this was the start of her musical career. She began singing with a local band Longshot until she graduated from high school in 1982 and the band dissolved. She then joined a cover band and toured Ontario. In 1987, Shania’s mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident. She moved back to her parents’ house to take care of her younger siblings and began singing at a nearby resort.
MEN’S SHIRTS, SHORT SKIRTS. While working as a singer at Deerheart Resort in Ontario as she was taking care of her siblings, Shania Twain was inspired by a drag performance. Years later, Mutt Lange played a riff on his guitar which Twain added a line that she coined at the drag performance, “Man! I feel like a woman!” While other tracks on Come on Over charted higher than today’s song, the iconic pro-feminist anthem with its iconic inverted Robert Palmer-inspired music video is probably Twain’s best-remembered track. It’s the ‘90s version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” but with some implied gender-bending. Perhaps the song has always been controversial with a conservative country-music audience for its pro-feminist themes. Twain’s song doesn’t feel like an inauthentic political stance but a celebration of who she is. Twain still makes music today. Her fame began to wane after Come on Over, though the follow-up still produced hits and sold well. After several hiatuses due to vocal trouble in the ‘00s and ‘10s, Twain has released albums with the latest, Queen of Me, being released last year. Today “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” celebrates self-acceptance.
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