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Shania Twain is still writing herself into our lives

After selling 100 million records and surviving a career-threatening vocal injury, the country-pop icon has reached the rarest place in music: She has nothing left to prove.

By Matt Mitchell | Paste Magazine | August 21, 2026

Shania Twain is our greatest living unifier. I was raised in a blood-red town of 2,500 people, acres of fescue, and one traffic light. I was a closeted queer and a not-so-closeted socialist, but the only thing the sh*t-kicker-wearing, truck-driving guys and I could agree on was “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” Pit Vipers engaged, feet tapping, howling that chorus at the top of our lungs… “Let’s go, girls” called us into formation and “Oh, oh, oh” was the rallying text that defied gender and class. You couldn’t get that from our other obsessions, like Nirvana or A$AP Ferg. I’ve danced to Twain’s music at every wedding, and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” is the only song I’ve ever bought on TouchTunes. 

Twain has sustained a long arm of cultural relevancy for three decades, having sold over 100 million records in her lifetime. Some artists make thirty, forty records and never sniff a million sales, but the bulk of Twain’s came from The Woman in Me, Come on Over, and Up!, all released in a seven-year span. What’s most impressive is that she went fifteen years without releasing a record at all. The honesty of her work is why people keep pressing play. By 1997’s Come On Over—the best-selling studio album by a woman and the best-selling country album of all time—she was exhausted by feeling uncomfortable in her own skin. “I asked myself, ‘What are you waiting for? Just enjoy being a woman. Enjoy,’” she tells me. “It was always difficult for me, being young in a man’s industry—the only girl a lot of the time. And sometimes you just want to crawl into yourself and say, ‘I don’t want to be a girl. I just want to be a singer. Do they have to see me as this object?’” Twain eventually put her foot down and made songs colored by quotable self-worth. 

In the nineties, she was labeled a “country singer” along with other crossover giants like Faith Hill. And in an era so dependent on genre-based radio, categorization was king. “It was a little hard to determine [my genre] for my label,” Twain remembers, “because I had roots of what I call ‘country and western,’ and then doing so much pop and rock was always going to influence my music.” But as algorithms and AI-curated playlists broadened music tastes and removed familiar signifiers, the box around her has finally opened up, and she’s added more hyphens to her toolkit. “If mainstream genres had been as fluid then as they are now, do you think you might’ve done anything differently?” I ask. No, she says. “I’m thinking more about artists who would’ve also been kind of difficult to categorize, like Fleetwood Mac or even Olivia Newton-John. Look at Linda Ronstadt; when I was a kid, I didn’t even know what that was. I’m not even sure what category she was in, because she would’ve definitely been considered ‘country.’ But as a kid, she was really more of a folk rock artist. The artists are who they are, and then the goalposts move.”  

After making Up! in 2002, Twain’s life wasn’t the fairytale that her mid-nineties successes may have first forecasted. A Greatest Hits compilation two years later spawned three new singles, all of which flopped on the charts. She and her first husband, Mutt Lange, divorced in 2010, and her long-rumored fifth album faced numerous delays. The biggest setbacks were Lyme disease and dysphonia diagnoses that weakened her singing voice. “I was really faced with dealing with the possibility that I would never be able to ever maintain my stage voice again,” she remembers. “That’s devastating for a performer, and even a recording artist. I just struggled so much through it. I was really grieving that loss.”

But a duet of “Endless Love” with Lionel Richie in 2012 reminded Twain that her voice—one of country music’s most recognizable contraltos—was still there, as she told me in 2023. After Now came out in 2017, she underwent laryngoplasty to repair her damaged vocal muscles. “It was as if I’d won the lottery or something,” she beams. “I know that any talents are gifts. You’re born with them. You can’t really take credit for a talent. You can take credit for developing it, but you can’t take credit for the actual gift of the talent. So I felt like I was gifted this voice all of a sudden all over again.” The inhibitions that dogged her finally evaporated, and she made Queen of Me, rising from recovery with a weightier, textured singing voice and new personal context for her silver-lined anthems. 

People still underestimate the work Twain put into rebuilding herself, and she sees that same dismissal being leveraged against up-and-coming singers now. “I already know what it’s like to really be a workaholic for a period of your career in order to become established,” she says. “I look at them and I go, ‘Whoa, I know what you’re going through.’ I know how hard they’re working and I know what they’re sacrificing.” The phase she’s in now is different, though. She’s making records for the love of the game, not because she’s the biggest country star on the planet and needs to release 75% of her Platinum-certified album as singles. “I’m not willing to start over again,” Twain admits. “I’m really more grateful than anything that I’m not that new artist and that I’m not still trying to sustain something. There comes a place when you’re in music history and that’s it, and it feels really good and it’s great. And you go, ‘Yeah, I’ve worked for it. I earned it.’”

Her seventh studio album, Little Miss Twain, emphasizes that. She’s not out to make “Any Man of Mine Pt. II.” Instead, she’s inviting forward-thinking artists and household names into her ecosystem. Her status as one of the biggest country-pop icons of the last three decades—and possibly ever—means that she could pick up the phone and get anyone to answer. The only rule is that they have to blow her mind. “I always want to be surprised by what other people can do and in awe of what they can do,” she insists. “You hold them in high regard for things that you know they’re better at than you are.” A credits list that includes Ammo, Ray Parker Jr., T Bone Burnett, Stella Mozgawa, Tanya Tucker, Jon Brion, Josh Homme, and Ronnie Wood turns Little Miss Twain into Twain’s most high-profile release since Up! 

But it’s not just about making a recognizable album with recognizable names for her. It’s about taking advantage of talented people and analog equipment before it all becomes obsolete. “I do feel that we are at a point where we have less and less authentic live musicians playing on records,” Twain says. “Using real microphones, using real live rooms—I thought this could be the end of an era. We might start losing a lot of our great musicians because there’s not enough work for them.” It’s a surprisingly existential concern for an album that is otherwise so playful (aside from the Tanya Tucker-assisted title song, which is a moving tribute to Twain’s mother). Twain quickly suggests that Little Miss Twain was made in opposition to a culture moving away from human instinct and into AI-generated complacency. “It was fun to use as much humanity, musically, as possible in the making of the record. And it suited the music, because the lyrics and the stories were that. They all belonged together.” 

This love for humanity spans Twain’s career, super-sized yet imperfect as it’s been. I cherish our interviews, because she’s a down-to-earth conversationalist with more self-awareness than most icons her age. And she is an icon, even if Little Miss Twain isn’t a record that’s going to give her a mid-career resurgence rivaling the highs of The Woman in Me or Come on Over. I doubt it will win Twain her sixth Grammy or even get nominated for one. In fact, at no point in our conversation does she suggest that LP7 is her best like most artists would while doing press. But I get the sense that kind of thinking doesn’t appeal to Twain, so I ask her if her motivations are different now than they were thirty years ago. “I like the word ‘motivated,’ because what motivates me is I have this hunger to express my musical ideas,” she says. “For me, it’s a love. It’s a love that I do for myself, if I have to be honest, because I make music for myself. It’s such an indulgent experience.” And the more records she sells and the more streams her songs accumulate, the more obvious it becomes that we’re all holding onto her still, even when the swings she takes in “Problematic” or “Dirty Rosie” miss so significantly. 

“You have to make a big impact at the beginning, which is so difficult. I’m really happy I went through that phase and then was able to establish myself,” she says. “But when you’re around for a long time, you become part of people’s own growth in life. And the music creates stamps and grooves in events in their lives, whether it’s the first love or the first heartbreak or a certain summer or a wedding or grief or whatever it is. And that stays with people.” That also creates nostalgia, but Twain isn’t afraid of it. In fact, she’s eager for it. “I appreciate what the fans love about following an artist for years because I’m one of those people. I’m a fan that way, and I love that we have these references in our lives that we can refer to, where we’ve picked up on an artist in our life.” 

She has that in common with Harry Styles, who brought her on tour with him for twelve dates at Wembley in a heatwave-afflicted London this summer. If we’re comparing careers, it’s a funny pairing. “Did you ever imagine that, this far into your career, you’d be opening for somebody who grew up in a world where you were already a superstar?” I ask Twain. “It’s quite surreal,” she laughs, “but it’s just a huge compliment to be invited by someone from another generation that is not just a fan, but, I would say, more of a mega fan. He has such a respect for my music and for me, and I think we just have a lot in common, even though we’re from different generations.” 

Writing songs with Tyler Joseph or duetting with Josh Homme isn’t so much a needle-mover as a head-scratcher, but I root for Twain even when her music doesn’t impress me much. I know I can always return to “Any Man of Mine” and “You’re Still the One,” but when she sings about her mother calling her the next Tanya Tucker, I’m reminded why Twain’s generation made her a superstar in the first place. “And those are the really cool and genuinely rewarding things that come with sticking it out with a career for so long,” she says. “Otherwise you would never see those things come around.”

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/shania-twain/shania-twain-interview-august-2026