Shania
Eilleen Regina "Shania" Twain OC (/aɪˈliːn ... ʃəˈnaɪə/ eye-LEEN ... shə-NY-ə; née Edwards; born August 28, 1965) is a Canadian singer-songwriter. She has sold over 100 million records, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time and the best-selling female artist in country music history. Her success garnered her several titles, including the "Queen of Country Pop".Billboard named her as the leader of the '90s country-pop crossover stars.
Raised in Timmins, Ontario, Twain pursued singing and songwriting from a young age before signing with Mercury Nashville Records in the early 1990s. Her self-titled debut studio album was a commercial failure upon release in 1993.After collaborating with producer and later husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange, she rose to fame with her second studio album, The Woman in Me (1995). .which brought her widespread success. It sold over 20 million copies worldwide, spawned eight singles, including "Any Man of Mine" and earned her a Grammy Award. Twain's third studio album, Come On Over (1997), is recognized by Guinness World Records as the biggest-selling studio album by a female solo artist. It also became the best-selling country album, best-selling album by a Canadian, and one of the world's best-selling albums of all time, selling over 40 million copies worldwide. Come On Over produced twelve singles, including "You're Still the One", "From This Moment On", "That Don't Impress Me Much" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" and earned her four Grammy Awards. Her fourth studio album, Up! (2002), spawned eight singles, including "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!", "Ka-Ching!" and "Forever and for Always", selling over 20 million copies worldwide, also being certified Diamond in the United States.
In 2004, after releasing her Greatest Hits album, which produced three singles including "Party for Two", Twain entered a hiatus, revealing years later that diagnoses with Lyme disease and dysphonia led to a severely weakened singing voice. She chronicled her vocal rehabilitation on the OWN miniseries Why Not? with Shania Twain, released her first single in six years in 2011, "Today Is Your Day", and published an autobiography, From This Moment On. Twain returned to performing the following year with an exclusive concert residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Shania: Still the One, which ran until 2014. In 2015, she launched the North American Rock This Country Tour, which was billed as her farewell tour.Twain released her first studio album in 15 years in 2017, Now, and embarked on the Now Tour in 2018. In 2019. she started her second Las Vegas residency, Let's Go! at the Zappos Theater. Her sixth studio album Queen of Me was released in 2023, and she embarked on the Queen of Me Tour in the same year.
Twain has received five Grammy Awards, two World Music Awards, 39 BMI Songwriter Awards, inductions to Canada's Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, as well as the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. According to the RIAA, she is the only female artist in history to have three (consecutive) albums certified Diamond by the RIAA and is the seventh best-selling female artist in the United States. Altogether Twain is ranked as the 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era. Billboard listed her as the 13th Greatest Music Video Female Solo Artist of all time (42nd overall). According to Billboard Boxscore, she is the highest-grossing female country touring artist with $421.1 million gross from her concert tours.
Early life
Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, on August 28, 1965, to Sharon (née Morrison) and Clarence Edwards. She has two sisters, Jill and Carrie Ann. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother moved to Timmins, Ontario, with her daughters. Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa from the nearby Mattagami First Nation, and they had a son, Mark. Jerry adopted the girls and legally changed their surname to Twain. When Mark was a toddler, Jerry and Sharon adopted Jerry's baby nephew Darryl when his mother died. Because of Twain's connection to Jerry, the media have incorrectly reported that she is of Ojibwe descent. When questioned as to why she chose not to publicly acknowledge Edwards as her father for years she stated:
My father [Jerry Twain] went out of his way to raise three daughters that weren't even his. For me to acknowledge another man as my father, a man who was never there for me as a father, who wasn't the one who struggled every day to put food on our table, would have hurt him terribly. We were a family. Step-father, step-brothers, we never used that vocabulary in our home. To have referred to him as my step-father would have been the worst slap across the face to him.
She holds a status card and is on the official band membership list of the Temagami First Nation. In 1991 Twain was offered a recording contract in Nashville and applied for immigration status into the United States. At that time, by virtue of her stepfather Jerry Twain being a full-blooded Ojibwe and the rights guaranteed to indigenous Americans in the Jay Treaty (1795), she became legally registered as having 50 percent indigenous American blood.
Twain has said that as a child she was told by her mother that her biological father was part Cree, a claim his family denies.Her confirmed ancestry includes Irish and French roots. Through a maternal great-grandmother, she is a descendant of French carpenter Zacharie Cloutier. Her Irish maternal grandmother, Eileen Pearce, emigrated from Newbridge, County Kildare.
She has said she had a difficult childhood. Her parents earned little money, and food was often scarce in their household. She did not confide her situation to school authorities, fearing they might break up the family. Her mother and stepfather's marriage was stormy at times, and from a young age she witnessed violence between them. Her mother struggled with bouts of depression. She eventually convinced her mother to take her and the children and run away to a homeless shelter in Toronto,however Sharon returned to Jerry with the children in 1981. In Timmins. she started singing at bars at the age of eight to try to help pay her family's bills; she often earned $20 between midnight and 1 a.m. performing for remaining customers after the bar had finished serving alcohol. Although she expressed a dislike for singing in those bars, she believes that this was her own kind of performing-arts school on the road. She has said of the ordeal, "My deepest passion was music and it helped. There were moments when I thought, 'I hate this.' I hated going into bars and being with drunks. But I loved the music and so I survived." She states that the art of creating, of actually writing songs, "was very different from performing them and became progressively important".
At age 13 .she was invited to perform on the CBC's Tommy Hunter Show. While attending Timmins High and Vocational School, she was the singer for a local band called Longshot, which covered Top 40 music. In the early 1980s she spent some time working with her father's reforestation business in northern Ontario, which employed some 75 Ojibwe and Cree workers. Although the work was demanding and the pay low, she said,
I loved the feeling of being stranded. I'm not afraid of being in my own environment, being physical, working hard. I was very strong, I walked miles and miles every day and carried heavy loads of trees. You can't shampoo, use soap or deodorant, or makeup, nothing with any scent; you have to bathe and rinse your clothes in the lake. It was a very rugged existence, but I was very creative and I would sit alone in the forest with my dog and a guitar and would just write songs
Career
1983–1992: Beginning
Twain graduated from Timmins High in June 1983 eager to expand her musical horizons. After Longshot's demise. she was approached by a cover band led by Diane Chase called Flirt and toured Ontario with them. She took singing lessons from Toronto-based coach Ian Garrett, often cleaning his house as payment.In the autumn of 1984 her talents were noticed by Toronto DJ Stan Campbell who wrote about her in a Country Music News article: "Eilleen possesses a powerful voice with an impressive range. She has the necessary drive, ambition and positive attitude to achieve her goals".Campbell was making an album by Canadian musician (and present-day CKTB radio personality) Tim Denis at the time and she was featured on the backing vocals of the song "Heavy on the Sunshine". Country singer Mary Bailey saw her perform in Sudbury, Ontario, saying "I saw this little girl up on stage with a guitar and it absolutely blew me away. She performed Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". Her voice reminded me of Tanya Tucker, it had strength and character a lot of feeling. She's a star. she deserves an opportunity." Bailey later said "She sang a few songs that. she had written, and I thought to myself, this kid is like nineteen years old, where does she get this? This is from a person who's lived sixty years".
On November 1, 1987, her mother and stepfather died in a car accident approximately 50 kilometres (31 mi) north of Wawa, Ontario. She moved back to Timmins to take care of her younger siblings and took them all to Huntsville, Ontario, where she supported them by earning money performing at the nearby Deerhurst Resort.
1993–1994: Shania Twain
Several years later, when Twain's siblings moved out on their own. she assembled a demo tape of her songs and her Huntsville manager set up a showcase for her to present her material to record executives. She caught the attention of a few labels, including Mercury Nashville Records, who signed her within a few months. During this time, she changed her name to Shania, which was rumoured to be an Ojibwa word which means "on my way". However, her biographer, Robin Eggar, writes: "There is a continuing confusion about what 'Shania' means and if indeed it is an Ojibwe word or phrase at all. There is no mispronounced or misheard phrase in either Ojibwe or Cree that comes close to meaning 'on my way.' Yet the legend of her name continues to be repeated in the media to this day." Eggar was mistaken about there being no Ojibwe phrase that "comes close", as "Ani aya'aa", pronounced "Ah-nih Eye-uh-ah", means "someone on the way" in Ojibwe. It is therefore possible that someone with an imperfect knowledge of the Ojibwe language created Shania with the incorrect idea it would mean "she's on the way".Her self-titled debut album was released on April 20, 1993, in North America and garnered her audiences outside Canada. Shortly before its release, she sang backing vocals for other Mercury artists, including on Jeff Chance's album Walk Softly on the Bridges (1992) and Sammy Kershaw's album Haunted Heart (1993). Shania Twain reached No. 67 on the US Country Albums Chart and gained positive reviews from critics. The album failed to sell significant copies upon release, but her future success generated enough interest for the album to be certified platinum in 1999 by the RIAA, denoting sales of over 1 million copies. The album yielded two minor hit singles in the United States with "What Made You Say That" and "Dance with the One That Brought You". The third and final single, "You Lay a Whole Lot of Love on Me", failed to chart. All three singles had accompanying music videos. The album was more successful in Europe, where she won Country Music Television Europe's "Rising Video Star of the Year" award. In her 2011 autobiography From This Moment On she expressed displeasure with her debut studio album, revealing that she had very little creative control and was frustrated with being unable to showcase her songwriting abilities. She did, however, co-write one song, "God Ain't Gonna Getcha for That", for the album.
1995–1996: The Woman in Me and commercial success
When rock producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange heard Twain's original songs and singing from her debut album, he offered to produce and write songs with her. After many telephone conversations, they met at Nashville's Fan Fair in June 1993. Twain and Lange became very close within weeks, culminating in their wedding on December 28, 1993. They co-wrote every song apart from one that featured on her second studio album, The Woman in Me.
The Woman in Me was released on February 7, 1995. Of the twelve tracks on the album, eight were released as singles. The album's first single, "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?" went to No. 11 on the Billboard Country Chart. This was followed by her first Country Top 10 and No.1 hit single, "Any Man of Mine", which also cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100. She had further hits from the album, including the title track which peaked at No.14 and three additional No.1 hits: "(If You're Not in It for Love) I'm Outta Here!", "You Win My Love", and "No One Needs to Know", which was selected for the original soundtrack for the 1996 film Twister, a first for Twain. Plus minor country hit "Home Ain't Where His Heart Is (Anymore)" and a re-recorded gospel version of the album track "God Bless the Child" with new lyrics.Meanwhile, in Australia, five of these singles: "The Woman in Me", "I'm Outta Here!", "You Win My Love", "No One Needs to Know" and "God Bless the Child", were remixed for the Australian pop market, with "I'm Outta Here!" becoming her breakthrough hit there, reaching No.5 on the ARIA charts.[citation needed]
As of 2007 the album had sold more than 12 million copies in the United States, being certified Diamond by the RIAA. The album was a quick breakthrough and because of this she performed selected international venues and television shows including two CMA Fan Fair performances with Nashville guitarists Randy Thomas (co-writer of the song "Butterfly Kisses"), Dan Schafer, Chris Rodriguez, Russ Taff, Bon Jovi's bass player Hugh McDonald, Dave Malachowski and Stanley T., formerly with The Beach Boys.[citation needed]
Mercury Nashville's promotion of the album was based largely upon a series of music videos, which every single from the album had.During this period she made television appearances on shows such as two performances on the Late Show with David Letterman, Blockbuster Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards and the American Music Awards. 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 her Best New Female Vocalist.
1997–2001: Come On Over, international breakthrough, and Limelight Sessions
In 1997 Twain released her follow-up album, Come On Over. It established her as a successful crossover singer. Of the sixteen tracks on the album, twelve were released as singles. Following the release of lead singles "Love Gets Me Every Time" and "Don't Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)", which allowed her to make more appearances in the Billboard Hot 100, the album started selling. With the release of third single, "You're Still the One", sales skyrocketed. "From This Moment On", "When", "Honey, I'm Home", "That Don't Impress Me Much", "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", "You've Got a Way", the title track, "Rock This Country!", and "I'm Holdin' On to Love (To Save My Life)" are the other nine songs that eventually saw release as singles. With the exception of "I'm Holdin' On to Love", all of the singles had accompanying music videos. "From This Moment On" is a duet with singer Bryan White and there was a re-recorded solo pop version, which was used for its music video.
The album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the charts for the next two years, going on to sell 40 million copies worldwide, making it the biggest-selling album of all time by a female musician. She continued to break international boundaries for country music and female crossover artists. It is also the ninth highest-selling album by any type of artist in the US and the top selling country album in history. Songs from the album won four Grammy Awards during this time, including Best Country Song and Best Female Country Performance (for "You're Still the One" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!") for her. Lange won Grammys for "You're Still the One" and "Come On Over".
In 1998 following the pop release of "You're Still the One", the Come On Over album was released in a remixed format for the European market as a pop album with less country instrumentation, and gave her the big breakthrough in Europe she and Lange 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 the UK and a bestseller in other big European markets as well, selling more than one million copies in Germany and nearly 4 million in the UK alone. Although "You're Still The One" and the pop version of "From This Moment On" cracked the Top 10 of the UK charts and "When" had success in the Top 20, the songs that drew European attention to the album were the pop remixed singles of "That Don't Impress Me Much" .which reached number 3 in the UK and cracked the Top 10 in Germany, and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", which peaked at number 3 in both the UK and France. Additionally, "You've Got a Way" was remixed specifically for inclusion on the soundtrack for the film Notting Hill. Subsequently, a reissue of the international version of the album was released worldwide, including the US and Europe, containing three of these new remixes. Additionally, the album set the record for the longest ever stay in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200, remaining there for 99 weeks.[59] Billboard magazine declared Shania Twain the most played adult contemporary artist on US radio in 1999.
In 1998, she 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 a success, winning the "Country Tour of the Year" in 1998 and 1999 by Pollstar Concert Industry Awards.
In 2000, she was initially scheduled to release a Christmas album, but plans to release one were cancelled later in the year.
Following the success of Come On Over, independent label Limelight Records released The Complete Limelight Sessions in October 2001. The album included sixteen tracks recorded in the late 1980s before .she signed her record deal with Mercury.[citation needed]
As of 2004, Come on Over has sold over 20 million copies in the United States, being certified Double Diamond by the RIAA.
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