It’s not up to 24 hours sooner than Shania Twain rocks the big city at the big daddy of arenas — Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden — and the diamond-selling diva nonetheless has disagree thought what she’s getting to put on at her sold-out live performance. That’s proper — the ’90s taste icon is flipping the trend script on every night time of her “Queen of Me” excursion, pulling and repurposing items from her personal closet on a cloth cabinet whim.
“It’s always a bit of being on the edge with the looks every night because there’s no wearing it twice,” she says. “It’s a one-time shot — and either it works or it doesn’t. I keep it a little dangerous because I get bored. So I’m really running with it, but I’m really enjoying the intensity of it.”
Certainly, nearest placing pose nearest pose in a fierce flurry of glam getups for her Alexa preserve kill, Twain is now feeling disagree pre-show tension. Sipping Champagne in a Chelsea Piers studio with a view of the solar surroundings over decrease Ny, she’s the image of cozy-in-my-skin relax as she stretches out like a cat on a sofa — whilst her 2-year-old Pomeranian, Sapphire, barks for her consideration.
By no means thoughts that the singer is juggling a global excursion (the Ecu leg kicks off on Sept. 14 in Glasgow, Scotland), a twenty fifth yearly reissue of her 1997 blockbuster “Come on Over,” and a lately introduced go back to Sin Town (her unedited Las Vegas residency opens in Would possibly 2024).
Only a couple weeks nearest turning 58 — which Twain celebrated by way of dedicating her signature ballad “You’re Still the One” to enthusiasts in a video shared on social media — the country-pop queen is ruling each a part of her global with obese boss power.
That’s the empowering essence of “Queen of Me,” the singer’s 6th studio booklet, which used to be spared in February.
“It really means, ‘I’m the boss of me,’” she says of the LP’s identify. “I make my own decisions, I am confident in those decisions, and I take responsibility for those actions. And that makes me more comfortable in my own skin, makes me … a lot harder to throw off balance. I’m not a control freak, but I do believe in taking ownership of your own frame of mind. I accept responsibility for my own spirit, and if I’m not feeling happy right now, then I gotta change that. It’s not up to my man to change that. Rise to it yourself.”
Shedding a way of regulate right through COVID lockdowns impressed the releasing spirit of “Queen of Me.”
Simply pluck a concentrate to the one “Giddy Up!” — a buoyant bop that delivers “smiles for miles.”
“What the songwriting process did for me was allow me to escape into another frame of mind,” Twain explains. “I wanted to put some ‘up’ in my ‘giddy.’ So I wrote myself out of this COVID funk. I was able to project myself into this happy place. All of the songs were born from that escapism.”
When it got here to doing the booklet art work, the Canadian-born, Swiss-based songstress embraced a special roughly autonomy by posing nude — strategically covering certain areas — in a photograph kill.
“Well, I’m the opposite from being an exhibitionist,” says Twain. “But I like to feel sexy, and I like to enjoy my body more now than ever. I used to hate my body. So when my body was young and, I guess, maybe one wouldn’t be afraid of exhibiting it, I was hiding it a lot.”
However Twain let go all of her inhibitions — proper at the side of her garments — in her 50s.
“I think I needed to capture where I am right now, because it’s a moment that I want to remember,” she displays. “So I just had to be brave about it, to own it. And I felt really good that I felt like, ‘Yeah, I’m OK with that.’ I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror every day. I’m perfectly the way I should be. This is the way I should be at my age. I’m fine with it. And I’m not afraid of it anymore. It’s all good.”
Twain credit her pristine angle to experiencing a midlife passage.
“I think menopause was a very good thing for me because there were a lot more things changing in everything about me physically that I had to very quickly come to terms with,” she says.
“Menopause taught me to quickly say, ‘You know, it may only get worse. So just love yourself now. Just get over your insecurities — they’re standing in your way. And fear is standing in your way.’ I always sing about being fearless and all of that. I go there when I write. But I’m not living it the way I’m writing it. And I want to live the way I write. I’m more fierce than I ever was because I really demanded it about myself.”
If Twain resides her absolute best age now, later she’s undoubtedly earned it.
Rising up in a little the city in Ontario, Canada, she overcame poverty and an abusive stepfather, which she unfolded about in her 2011 memoir, “From This Moment On,” and her 2022 Netflix documentary “Not Just a Girl.”
She no longer most effective survived, however thrived nearest the very society 2008 scandal of her ex-husband and manufacturer, Robert “Mutt” Lange — with whom she has a son, EJ, 22 — cheating on her with her then-best friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud.
She sooner or later discovered love once more with Thiébaud’s ex-husband, Swiss businessman Frédéric Thiébaud — the pair were married since 2011.
She additionally persisted a struggle with Lyme defect that led to career-threatening vocal-cord harm, however nearest present process open-throat surgical procedure in 2018, she was the cool darling of a pristine era by way of duetting with Harry Kinds at Coachella in 2022.
Suffice to mention, she’s indubitably come a ways from the girl who was a country-crossover sensation lengthy sooner than Taylor Speedy, with 3 consecutive diamond-selling albums: 1995’s “The Woman in Me,” 1997’s “Come on Over” and 2002’s “Up!”
Her greatest blockbuster, “Come on Over,” went diamond two times over, with US gross sales of over 20 million — an unfathomable determine in these days’s streaming-dominated global — because of hits akin to “You’re Still the One,” “From This Moment On,” “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.”
When Twain plays the closing two tunes on her “Queen of Me” excursion — which comes again to North The usa on Oct. 12 — she dons the untouched outfits from their fresh, boundary-pushing movies.
“It was just natural — I didn’t know what it was gonna do,” she says of her groundbreaking video optic. “There was no specific mission. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Let’s do something not typically country.’ None of us had any experience in country videos … like, what they were meant to look like. I wanted to just try this and this and this. And I was given that freedom.”
The trendsetting Twain — whose favourite designers come with Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Roberto Cavalli — shook up the country establishment with her style and imagery, however she was quite of a Nashville outsider within the procedure.
“I had a lot of pushback from the country-music genre,” she says. “The visual elements were rejected entirely. They made country very nervous. I don’t feel I ever had country-music cred. But, like, I didn’t try to fit in there. I wanted to be international. And I’m so grateful that I didn’t walk the line.”
Photographer: Marc Hom; Writer: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Photograph Writer: Jessica Hober; Style Assistants: Alex Bullock, Jena Beck; Hair: Frankie Foye at IMAJ Artists the use of Oribe; Make-up: Ayami Nishimura at Ahead Artists the use of Pat McGrath, Nail cutting: Sonya Meesh at Ahead Artists the use of Kiss Nails
