Tommy's #1 SHANIA TWAIN SuperSite Message Board

barebackwarrior · Senior Member

RE: Shania announces "Rock This Country" tour on "GMA" - FINAL tour

Stevie · Veteran Member

Good point! I'll always still be interested.

Butters · Guru

An artist does not vanish from touring for 13 years and then call her next tour a "farewell" tour. Very silly.

Tommy · Guru

Shania Twain Extends Tour, Talks Missing Life on the Road

Superstar's first tour in 11 years launches next month, runs through mid-October

By Andrew Leahey | May 8, 2015

More than a decade after wrapping up her 10-month Up! Tour, Shania Twain is hitting the highway again. The Rock This Country Tour, which recently swelled from 48 to 67 dates, won't just mark her long-awaited return to the road; it'll double as the final tour of her career, with Twain building up buzz for a new album along the way.

The summertime trek was originally scheduled to end in late August, following a string of shows in Southern California. Earlier this week, Twain announced an extension of 19 shows across the United States and Canada, with the Rock This Country Tour now coming to a close on October 11th in Toronto, less than a four-hour drive from her birthplace of Windsor, Ontario.

Twain didn't allow much time to elapse between the end of her two-year Las Vegas residency, which wrapped in December, and the new tour, which kicks off June 5th in Seattle. She did, however, spend the interim whipping up an entirely new production.

"The atmosphere of going to the people is just different," she told Rolling Stone Country this week, highlighting the distinctions between a residency that stays in one place and a tour that crisscrosses the continent. "When you're going to them and in you're in their zone, it's different. They're at home and you're visiting and they're welcoming you to their place. I feel more like I'm hosting them in Vegas, but when I go to their town, they're welcoming you with these open arms and their spirit is just so alive, and they're excited. And they're grateful that you've come to their town. They love to share their space and their world, and so do I, and that's where we come together."

Meanwhile, Twain continues to work on new music, with the goal of releasing her fifth album after the tour's end.

Here's the full Rock This Country Tour itinerary, including new dates in bold:

June 5 — Seattle, Washington, Key Arena at Seattle Center
June 7 — Vancouver, British Columbia, Pepsi Live at Rogers Arena
June 9 — Vancouver, British Columbia, Pepsi Live at Rogers Arena
June 11 — Edmonton, Alberta, Rexall Place
June 12 — Edmonton, Alberta, Rexall Place
June 14 — Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, SaskTel Centre
June 15 — Winnipeg, Manitoba, MTS Centre
June 19 — London, Ontario, Budweiser Gardens
June 20 — London, Ontario, Budweiser Gardens
June 22 — Hamilton, Ontario, FirstOntario Centre
June 24 — Toronto, Ontario, Air Canada Centre
June 25 — Toronto, Ontario. Air Canada Centre
June 27 — Ottawa, Ontario, Wesley Clover Parks
June 28 — Montreal, Quebec, Bell Centre
June 30 — New York City, New York, Madison Square Garden
July 1 — Long Island, New York, Nassau Coliseum
July 3 — Uncasville, Connecticut, Mohegan Sun Arena
July 7 — Newark, New Jersey, Prudential Center
July 8 — Boston, Massachusetts, TD Garden
July 10 — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, CONSOL Energy Center
July 11 — Grand Rapids, Michigan, Van Andel Arena
July 13 — Indianapolis, Indiana, Bankers Life Fieldhouse
July 15 — Jacksonville, Florida, Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena
July 16 — Miami, Florida, American Airlines Arena
July 18 — Greenville, South Carolina, Bon Secours Wellness Arena
July 19 — Charlotte, North Carolina, Time Warner Cable Arena
July 21 — Washington, D.C., Verizon Center
July 22 — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Wells Fargo Center
July 25 — Auburn Hills, Michigan, Palace of Auburn Hills
July 26 — Moline, Illinois, iWireless Center
July 28 — Minneapolis, Minnesota, Target Center
July 29 — Rosemont, Illinois, AllState Arena
July 31 — Nashville, Tennessee, Bridgestone Arena
August 1 — Atlanta, Georgia, Philips Arena
August 3 — Louisville, Kentucky, KFC Yum! Center
August 4 — St. Louis, Missouri, Scottrade Center
August 6 — Des Moines, Iowa, Wells Fargo Arena
August 7 — Kansas City, Missouri, Sprint Center
August 9 — Austin, Texas, Frank Erwin Center
August 10 — Dallas, Texas, American Airlines Center
August 12 — Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Chesapeake Energy Center
August 14 — Denver, Colorado, Pepsi Center
August 15 — Salt Lake City, Utah, EnergySolutions Arena
August 17 — San Jose, California, SAP Center at San Jose
August 19 — Anaheim, California, Honda Center
August 20 — Los Angeles, California, Staples Center
August 22 — San Diego, California, Valley View Casino Center
August 24 — Fresno, California, Save Mart Center
September 12 — Spokane, Washington, Spokane Arena
September 13 — Portland, Oregon, Moda Center
September 15 — Boise, Idaho, Taco Bell Arena
September 17 — Calgary, Alberta, Scotiabank Saddledome
September 18 — Calgary, Alberta, Scotiabank Saddledome
September 20 — Winnipeg, Manitoba, MTS Centre
September 21 — Fargo, North Dakota, FARGODOME
September 23 — Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Denny Sanford PREMIER Center
September 24 — Lincoln, Nebraska, Pinnacle Bank Arena
September 26 — Minneapolis, Minnesota, Target Center
September 27 — Madison, Wisconsin, Kohl Center
September 29 — Peoria, Illinois, Peoria Civic Center
September 30 — Columbus, Ohio, Nationwide Arena
October 2 — Allentown, Pennsylvania, PPL Center
October 3 — Buffalo, New York, First Niagara Center
October 6 — Manchester, New Hampshire, Verizon Wireless Arena
October 7 — Albany, New York, Times Union Center
October 9 — Quebec City, Quebec, Videotron Centre
October 11 — Toronto, Ontario, Air Canada Centre

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/shania-twain-extends-tour-talks-missing-life-on-the-road-20150508

Tommy · Guru

Shania Twain explains why the 'Rock This Country' tour will be her last

by Kyle Anderson | Entertainment Weekly | May 26, 2015

This summer, Shania Twain will do something she hasn’t done in over a decade: She’ll be going on tour. After spending the better part of two years performing as a resident at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, the 49-year-old Twain will be taking her show on the road. Not only will it be her first series of concerts in 11 years, but she also intends for it to be her last.

“I felt like I was going to accomplish everything I needed to accomplish, and what else was there left to do after Las Vegas? It was such a pinnacle moment in my performing career,” Twain tells EW. “It was a huge mountain for me to climb because I hadn’t been on stage in a long time, and I felt like I had arrived once I achieved that. I feel very satisfied after doing that. I’ve got so many things I want to do and not enough time to do them.” Those projects include a new album, which is currently in production and would be her first studio release since 2002’s diamond-selling Up!.

In a candid conversation for our Summer Must List issue (on stands now), Twain spoke with EW about her Vegas show, why she loves Bruce Springsteen, and the terrifying period when she thought she would never sing again.

Entertainment Weekly: What has pulled you back onto the road after the Las Vegas residency?
Shania Twain: My stage concert career is coming to an end, and I didn’t want to finish that in one room. I wanted go to the people instead of hosting and having everybody coming to me. I wanted to visit everybody else and go to their hometowns. It felt like the right spirit to be doing that in. Vegas surprised me—it was such a success. Of course I was hoping it would be a success, but you never really know. So there was a lot of relief there, and now that I’ve achieved that I want to enjoy it a little bit longer, and the next phase of that is to get out on the road and bring myself to the fans.

How is the planning going on this tour? How have you approached it?
I normally just start with a theme. What theme do I want? People want to hear the hits, so they’re going to get that. I wanted it to be a rock show. There are so many guitars in all the songs. So when I say a rock show, the music is still what it is. It’s not like now I’m just making all the songs rock, they are what they are. But the theme is a more straightforward rocking spectacle. The contemporary side is more the technology and what we can bring to the stage as far as gadgets. I told the director the theme I want, and we went from there with all the latest and greatest technology.

You’re in the middle of working on your first new album since 2002. Will there be new songs on this tour?
I think it’s to be determined. Maybe the timing will work out so that we can do that. It’s hard to know how soon the new music will be ready. I’m working on it all the time, but the irony of all this is going out on the road is going to slow all of that down. That’s my dilemma! When I’m out on the road and putting productions together, I’m not working on new music. I think when you’re a singer and a performer and you’re not a writer and you’re not involved with the production, you’re not really creating stuff, you can just tour and record all the time and never run out of steam or worry about that balance. I just feel like I need to grow another me if I’m going to be able to do it all. I need to get my petri dish out or something, and duplicate my creative self so I can write and record and produce and perform all at the same time. And I’m a parent of a teenage child and I’ve got a lovely marriage, and I’d like to balance my personal life as well. That takes dedication. But I’ve got all kinds of albums I want to make that I’ve been putting off—I’d love to make a Christmas album at some point. I really want to give people new music.

Since you haven’t recorded an album in so long, is there a backlog of hundreds of songs?
Oh yes. I want to do a lot more recording. I don’t feel like I’ve made enough records in my life. A lot of artists make a new album every year, and I just have such a sparse amount of recordings, and I’ve got a lot more to say and to sing in that sense. I’ve been lucky, because the fans are so dedicated to the music I already have, and they love that music. It’s their classic Shania—they own that. But that want new music, and so do I. It’s like anything. I grew up listening to Fleetwood Mac, and they’re still out there and still touring. I love the new stuff, but I’ll always want to hear the old stuff.

Who do you consider your peers in the touring world?
I think some of the classic artists are really still some of the best shows. I would say Springsteen is somebody who is a touring mentor. It just never gets old and it’s always exciting and the vibe is always amazing. He works so hard. It is work! It takes a commitment, and it’s a big commitment. The more you put in, the more you get out of it.

Before your Vegas residency, you had vocal problems and couldn’t sing for a long time. Did you ever think that it was over for you?
Yes, definitely. It was very depressing for me. I really believed that I would never sing again. I was convinced, because for a long time I just couldn’t get it out. It wasn’t my vocal cords, which was very frustrating—if it was a straight ahead problem I could just have an operation for, then I would have done it and dealt with it and got back to singing. But it was so much more mysterious than that. It’s been a giant, long-term issue. It was more like an athlete going into rehab for an injury. It was a slow, painful process—it was like having to learn to walk all over again after an accident. I had to learn how to use my voice again. It was all there, but I had to learn how to use the tools all over again from scratch, and it was very frustrating.

Do you think it has made you a different kind of singer?
There are parts of my voice that were never there or I never knew I had. I never discovered them because I was never forced to discover them. Just as an example: When I was on the road before, I never even warmed up. My voice was preserved really well and I was technically doing all the right things and never really struggled with my voice. Now I need an hour now of serious warming up. It’s very structured and disciplined. I’ve got to eat a very specific way on show days. I have to rest more. It just takes more work. That just could be age, too, that’s all part of it. I’ll have to do it forever. It’s a physical workout and a vocal workout. It’s very high maintenance. But I do think I sing better, and I think I can do more things with my voice now than I did before. When I say I sing better, I think I’ve got some better qualities that I never had before. Though there are some things I could sing when I was younger that I probably couldn’t sing now unless I had a two hour warm-up routine, which I’m not really willing to do.

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/05/26/shania-twain-explains-why-rock-this-country-tour-will-be-her-last

Tommy · Guru

Shania Twain finishes two weeks of rehearsals in Las Vegas ahead of final tour

By Robin Leach | May 28, 2015 | 5:04 p.m.

After two weeks of rehearsals here in Las Vegas, pop and country superstar Shania Twain is about to set off on her final road tour of 67 dates starting next Friday, June 5, and ending in Toronto in October.

I’ll catch up with her in San Diego in August and cannot wait to hear the final tour’s “Rock This Country” theme.

Although Shania says it’s a last live hurrah after her successful two-year residency at the Colosseum in Caesars Palace, she also says that she has major recording plans at the ready.

Her fifth album, the first since “Up” in 2002, will be recorded this fall now that she’s close to finishing the songwriting. She has originally hoped to record it during the Strip residency.

Shania credits the Las Vegas run in her Colosseum home with helping her get over the stress-induced vocal disorder that silenced her after the ugly divorce from producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, who ran away to marry her (ex-)best friend.

She says that she never used to warm up to go onstage but now needs 90 minutes to prepare her throat. She says that she’ll sing all of her hits on tour but focus on the rock side of their production with guitar-heavy instrumentals.

“It’s going to be visually exciting and very different from what we did in Las Vegas,” she said. “People will have never heard me this way before.”

One new song will be the rock version of “Party for Two” — her hit with Billy Currington, who headlines at Boulevard Pool in the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas on Friday night — that she‘s never performed live.

Another will be “Rock This Country” that she only performed here partly in an acoustic set. Shania says that she might try one or two of the new, self-penned album songs while out on tour.

http://lasvegassun.com/vegasdeluxe/2015/may/28/shania-twain-finishes-two-weeks-rehearsals-lv-ahea/

Tommy · Guru

Shania Twain Sets Out to “Rock This Country” on Farewell Tour Featuring Clay Paky Fixtures

Entertainment Technology News | July 27, 2015

Her farewell tour is called Rock This Country, and country icon Shania Twain is doing just that as she bids good-bye to her fans from coast to coast. More than 300 Clay Paky lighting fixtures are along for the ride, selected by lighting designer Mark Butts who also serves as the tour’s co-production designer with Raj Kapoor.

Last year when Twain was in her residency at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas where Kapoor was her show director, Butts conceived a 'big, edgy, modern rock & roll look' for her farewell tour. “I wanted a big lighting rig, big pyro, lots of automation – the biggest possible system that we could easily move around the country,” he says. “And that led me to Clay Paky.”

According to Butts: “The only way to implement a rig of this size was to use super efficient small, high-power lights with a ton of features. There was no way I could have done this without Clay Paky gear, especially Mythos – I couldn’t have done the show with standard, giant 1500-watt hard-edged fixtures. So I designed the show around the gear.” VER supplied the lighting to Butts’s specifications.

Fifty-six Clay Paky’s new Mythos fixtures are touring with Twain. Butts had evaluated Mythos demo units last year and used a large number of them on Kenny Chesney’s current Big Revival tour. “I had a lot of experience with them and knew they would work for Shania,” he says.

Most of the Mythos fixtures are mounted on ten upstage and ten downstage truss fingers, which run perpendicular to the primary lighting truss, notes Nashville-based lighting director and programmer Andre Petrus. “The Mythos are great – super bright and with low power consumption,” he says. “They act as beam or profile fixtures with colour mixing optics and animation wheels.”

Ninety-six A.leda B-EYE K20s are housed in six big automated aluminium pods, which can rise in the air or descend to the stage deck. Each pod contains 16 B-EYEs in a 4x4 configuration. “I knew that having big banks of them would be a major element of the show,” says Butts. “I like their individual pixel control and organic shape.”

Butts devised a unique way to showcase 120 Sharpy fixtures. He integrated them into 12 x 30-foot high moving set pieces. “I didn’t wanted to be locked into a giant upstage videowall,” he says. “So we designed chunks of wall that could spin and move on a track. Each piece has a 5mm LED wall on one side and a vertical row of ten Sharpys on the other. The pieces can spread out or come together in any configuration. I picked Sharpys because I wanted to pack a lot of lightweight, low-power fixtures with a lot of punch into a small space. They were the perfect choice.”

Petrus says the possible combinations for the modular moving LED/light walls are: “Almost endless. They can create a different look for every song.” He notes that: “The band risers also track stage right to stage left so the band is constantly on the move, too.”

Seventy-two Sharpy Washes are also mounted in the truss fingers where they wash the stage and band and deliver “big, cool aerial beam effects,” says Petrus. “I love how small and efficient they are while having a narrow, bright beam almost like Sharpy,” adds Butts. “They’re pretty versatile.”

Butts gives kudos to the continuing support he gets from A.C.T Lighting and its staff members, especially for big projects like the tour. “A.C.T is the gold standard in product support, so when they started to represent Clay Paky that told me all I needed to know about the products,” he says. “I haven’t been disappointed.”

Francesco Romagnoli, Clay Paky area manager for North and Latin America, added: “We’ve been a big fan of Mark’s work for years. It’s great to see him on this tour and we’re thrilled that he’s using so much of our gear.”

A.C.T Lighting is the exclusive North American distributor for Clay Paky. http://www.claypaky.it

http://www.etnow.com/news/2015/7/shania-twain-sets-out-to-rock-this-country-on-farewell-tour-featuring-clay-paky-fixtures