Shania Twain, the queen of country pop, will be back in the saddle this summer. The pride of Timmins, ON hits the road in June with her first major North American tour in more than a decade, stopping in Ottawa on June 27 to break in a new festival site.
The country-pop diva announced her Rock This Country tour Wednesday on Good Morning America. It kicks off in Seattle, Washington on June 5 but spends the next few weeks in Canada with 13 shows in Vancouver, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, London, Hamilton, Toronto and Montreal, as well as Ottawa.
The Ottawa concert is Twain’s only outdoor performance in Canada, and the first major concert to take place at the recently redeveloped Nepean equestrian facility, Wesley Clover Park. The site is expected to hold an estimated 40,000 people.
In Ottawa, Twain will headline a day-long festival that also features classic-rock stalwarts the Doobie Brothers.
Although Twain has not released a new album since 2002’s Up!, she has been performing. A two-year residency at Las Vegas’s Caesar Palace wrapped up in December. The show, entitled Shania: Still The One, was a grand spectacle that included two horses, a flying motorcycle, a campfire and snowstorm, and plenty of hits, including You’re Still The One, That Don’t Impress Me Much and Man! I Feel Like a Woman.
A CD/DVD version of the production, titled Still The One: Live From Vegas, was also released this week, Twain’s first new product since her 2004 greatest hits album.
This will be be Twain’s first Ottawa appearance since 2003, the same year she hosted the Juno Awards in Ottawa.
For Twain, who’s sold more than 75 million albums and is considered the biggest-selling country female artist in history, the tour is the centrepiece of a long-anticipated comeback. Twain hasn’t released a new album since 2002’s Up!, but she has been performing in recent years. A two-year residency at Las Vegas’s Caesar Palace wrapped up in December.
By all accounts, the Vegas show, Shania: Still The One, was a lavish affair, complete with two trained horses, a flying motorcycle, a campfire, a snowstorm and plenty of hits, including You’re Still the One, That Don’t Impress Me Much and Man! I Feel Like a Woman, to name a few. Highlights from the show were broadcast as a primetime television special on Feb. 28 that drew an estimated 2.5 million viewers. The production is also the subject of Twain’s new live CD/DVD package, also titled Shania: Still The One Live From Vegas, in stores March 2, her first new product since a 2004 greatest hits album.
Despite the blitz, there are no guarantees that Twain will be able to recapture her share of the country market. Although country is hot right now, it’s attracting a new generation of fans who are going for bro-country artists like Florida Georgia Line, Luke Bryan and Brad Paisley and pumped-up songs about girls, trucks and partying. It may be a challenge for Twain, a mom who turns 50 this year, to break into the new-country boys club with her anthems of female empowerment.
But if she can do it anywhere, it will be on home turf. Raised in Timmins, Twain overcame the odds to become the Juno-winning darling of the Canadian industry, earning multiple double-diamond certification for album sales of more than two million copies. She’s a member of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, Canada’s Walk of Fame and received the Order of Canada.
Her second album, The Woman in Me, which came out 20 years ago, first rocked the country world with a sassy mix of upbeat country and pop-rock. It was co-written and produced by her then-new husband, hit-making rock producer Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange, a reclusive genius who was better known for his work with acts like AC/DC, Def Leppard and Bryan Adams.
Twain’s next two albums, 1997’s Come on Over and 2002’s Up!, both produced by Lange, were also hugely successful. The couple made their home in a castle in Switzerland.
In 2001, Twain and Lange had a boy they named Eja. A few years later, though, they divorced after Lange allegedly had an affair with Twain’s best friend. In a soap-opera-like twist, Twain later married the ex-friend’s ex-husband.
In her 2011 memoir, From This Moment On, Twain describes falling into a depression after her divorce. She developed a condition called dysphonia, a disorder of the voice. In her case, she believed stress and anxiety caused the muscles around her vocal chords to tighten. She underwent therapy to treat it, and was in top form throughout the Vegas run.
On a break from Sin City, Twain tested the comeback waters last summer with two sold-out, outdoor concerts at the Calgary Stampede and one in P.E.I. Although she has yet to release a new studio album, Twain told the Calgary Herald last year that she’s writing all the time. “I’ll be in the studio as soon as I can get my ducks in a row,” she said.
