¶ Intro / Opening
🎵 Music
¶ Shania Twain's Life & Career
Hello and welcome to So the Jacker on Songwriting. I'm Brian, here as always with Simon, the Statler to my Waldorf, and joining us for episode 245 is a Grammy-winning Canadian singer and songwriter, not to mention the best-selling female artist in the history of country music. and one of the biggest selling artists of all time, with over a hundred million records sold,
She's a member of both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and as this episode drops in early February 2023, she's just released her sixth studio album, The Veritably Poptastic Queen of Me via Republic Records. We're thrilled to welcome the glorious Shania Twain to the show.
Shania was born Eileen Regina Edwards in nineteen sixty five in Windsor, Ontario, one of five kids, and grew up in the Canadian mining town of Timmins. Thanks to her parents, she heard a lot of old-time country and folk growing up, particularly artists like Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, Gordon Lightfoot and Jim Croce. Later, her listening gravitated towards bluegrass and vocal harmony groups like the Bee Gees and The Carpenters.
Her mum picked up on her daughter's musicality when she was only three years old. The young Eileen loved to sing and appeared to have a natural ear for harmony. At her mother's behest she began singing in local bars at the tender age of eight, but not until they'd stopped serving alcohol at midnight.
Although that of course meant her audiences tended to be extremely well lubricated,
It's a pretty scary environment for a young kid, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. After a couple of years on the local bar circuit, she was apparently given special permit to go on earlier.
Well that was nice of them. At one live engagement, our guest encountered pioneering Canadian country singer Mary Bailey, who'd become her mentor and her first manager. Following the death of her parents in her early twenties, Eileen became guardian of her younger siblings, providing for them over the next few years by performing nightly at the Deerhurst Resort Hotel in Huntsville.
Having been writing songs since she was ten, she was also grabbing any spare moment she could to work on her craft. She began sending demos of her work to record labels, and with her young charges having come of age, she signed to Mercury Nashville in nineteen ninety two. When the label requested she change her name, she opted for Shiniah, which I think had been the name of a wardrobe mistress at the Deerhurst.
Her eponymous debut album was released in nineteen ninety-three and mostly made up of songs written by others, but spared on by a burgeoning creative partnership with super producer Mutt Lang, Shania took much greater control over her artistic direction for the follow-up, The Woman in Me. That record proved her commercial breakthrough, shifting 20 million copies, but her next offering would eclipse even that.
Several years in gestation, 1997's Come On Over became the best-selling country album of all time. selling forty million copies, spawning no less than a dozen singles from its sixteen tracks, winning multiple Grammys and remaining on the Billboard chart for two years. Shanira Muss also joined Forces for two thousand and two's Up, her third diamond album in a row, an incredibly rare achievement.
Following the release of her Greatest Hits album in 2004, our guest was forced to take an extended hiatus from music due to contracting Lyme disease, which caused damage to her vocal cords. Thankfully, she was able to return to performing in twenty twelve, and a little further down the line delivered her fifth studio album, twenty seventeen's entirely self-penned Now, a chart topper on both sides of the Atlantic.
In twenty twenty two, Shania was the subject of the career spanning Netflix documentary Not Just a Girl.
If you've just discovered the Sota Jerker podcast, we hope you'll stick around and follow and rate us on your pod platform of choice, not to mention dig into our huge archive of interviews with great songwriters like Shania. Should you wish, you can also follow us on the usual socials where we can be found under So the J.
This is a fully independent, ad free show, so if you want to help us keep it that way, give whatever you can spare at sodajecker.comslash donate.
Before we move on, many thanks to Katie for her help setting up the interview.
Okay, here we are in conversation with the one and only Shania Twain.
🎵 Music
¶ "Queen of Me" & COVID-Era Writing
Hi Shania. Thanks for being with us.
My pleasure.
We've been immersing ourselves in the new album for the past couple of weeks.
Oh good. The couple of weeks is awesome.
Really maintained your usual high standards, we'd say.
Ah great, thank you.
From the moment I heard Giddy Up actually I knew this would be a good listen. It's the sort of song that sounds like it must have always existed. Like like surely you're kind of taken that phrase which is so familiar and found a great hook for it, but it seems you have.
Oh, yeah, no, this was one that I was playing around with for a little while and I'd been singing it in in various phrasings into my iPhone, playing around with like up in your giddy. more than the actual giddy up because I was thinking, you know, this is like a really fun, creative way of saying, you know, pep in your step or spice in your life. I mean, I I probably overthought it now that I'm breaking it down.
But like giddy to me is is happy. You know, when you're giddy, you're happy, you're chirpy. And so that was the whole thing behind the giddy word. And then putting some up in your giddy was Putting some spice in your life and and pep in your steps. So the giddy app was just part of the phrasing and the musical element of it. But I remember when when I got into the studio with David Stewart, I had to explain myself a little bit because it didn't really make a lot of sense.
to him necessarily just as a up in your giddy giddy up. Um, but then, you know, I went through this whole process that I'm doing with you right now and it's go, oh, okay, I I I hear that. And it was obviously meant to be a very up and happy, chirpy song.
Yeah.
It's a cheer up zone.
Yeah, and I feel like it's quite a focused album in general as well. Like you sing We Ain't Got Time to Waste on that track and it feels like that's almost kind of a mantra for the whole record, you know, it's quite lean, I think, quite sort of uh muscular.
Yeah. Because I wrote the entire album during COVID, it sort of threw me into a very, very productive Time and creative time. That isolation. Well, there's an irony there because in order to really get creative, I love to be solitary. I love to be alone. I need that space. It's me time, you know, songwriting is very much me time and self-help time too. So, but the forced isolation is, as we all know, it's a very different thing.
But the mind over matter came into play because I'm like, okay, what am I gonna do? Just write a bunch of melancholy, miserable songs. I gotta write myself out of that mood. I've gotta write myself into feeling up and happy and take charge of my mood and focus on putting myself in a positive frame of mind. And so the whole album was written taking charge of your own
Mood.
Switching your mood over. It was a great exercise. Even songs that I had started that were maybe more on the melancholy side, I deliberately started changing the narrative and changing sometimes the time signature and the groove and the tempo and just getting it to a space where it made me feel like I wanted to dance.
¶ Acoustic Roots & Song Structure
That's interesting you mentioned the word groove'cause I thought there's a very strong rhythmic element throughout the record. That seems to be an important aspect of your work in general, actually, doesn't it?
Oh, I definitely needed to be able to want to dance and move to every song, even a song like Last Day of Summer that is more ballady, you know, more like a you're still the one kind of thing. It's definitely more in the folky. singer-songwriter vein that I start so many of my songs in, but I wanted it to shuffle along a little faster. I wanted it to feel a little more floaty and lighter.
So you know, Mark Ralph did a great job with that. He's A fabulous musician and I just literally sat on the mic in his studio and him on guitar too and it just started picking up and picking up and rolling along like a more fast moving train, you know, clicking along a little bit.
🎵 Music
The other thing I think that keeps the mood kind of up is a lot of those sort of wordless hooks that you have in there as well, like um in Gide Up you've got that lovely kind of bridge that everyone kinda sings and then the start of Not Just the Girl, you've got that other kind of very power poppy doo doo section as well. Are these the sorts of things that you would find yourself singing into a voice memo or something like that?
Oh, definitely I do that with a lot of things. You know, I've never sat in a room and finished a song with a group of people before. This was the very first time I've done that.
Right.
But I was so ready to do it, you know, after all the alone time writing. Not that I'd, you know, capped out on my isolating writing, because I do love to write that way, you know, by myself. But I just felt like, wow, I just cannot wait to get in a room and share these ideas with some other creatives. And they were primarily guys, just happened that way. And so
Some of those parts that you're talking about are sung by the other writer in the room, you know, in the male voice. Like I would say, you know, I think you should sing this. I think you need to be up there in your falsetto and singing this. And even the really girly La la la's, you know. I mean, I'm in there, but it was so important that David Stewart sang them too, that it was also a guy in there singing these kind of girly, childish.
parts and all of that contrast I think just gives it a great texture.
And even though they all have quite lively production, the acoustic guitar seems to be the core of several of these songs. Does that mean that it's usually you and a guitar at the core of most of these things when they're being written?
Oh absolutely. I'm quite sure I can say with confidence that every single song was me started on the acoustic guitar. That is normally the way I start any song, you know, and then getting in the room with other creatives, you know, to finish the songs off or to maybe to write a bridge or to work out the arrangement in the room together.
Everyone else also played acoustic guitar. So it was great. It was a very organic way of working for me to be able to sit around with just acoustic guitars and me on a microphone. I think I'm really a folkie at heart and I spent so much of my youth doing uh
folk festivals and singing around in places with my guitar, coffee shops and stuff like that. So everything I did kind of sounded folky, whether it was country or pop or rock. It just ends up going there to that place when you're sitting there with an acoustic guitar.
It's often a nice way to test the strength of a song as well, isn't it, I suppose, to just strip it down and make sure that it just works on a guitar.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, take a song like I Will Always Love You, the Dolly Parton version. That was definitely her, this mountain girl who might even have plucked it out on a banjo, for all we know initially. Who knows? But my vision is of her sitting there with an acoustic guitar singing this song in a very folky style. And
Yet if you've never heard that version, you would only know the version sung by Whitney Houston, which you would not relate at all to starting out with just a mountain girl writing it on her acoustic guitar. So I think it's probably true for a lot of great songs. You know, it was someone sitting at one instrument. I mean, maybe Paul McCartney was doing it on a piano. Maybe you wouldn't say, you know, they were funky sounding, but
The one voice, the one instrument, and you've got a great song. Or if you've got a great song, it'll sound great with those three things.
¶ Crafting Catchy Choruses & Bridges
We were discussing earlier before we jumped on Zoom that we don't think you're credited enough for your ear for a chorus. You know, not that it should ever be in doubt after all those diamond records, but y you really know how to make a chorus arrive, don't ya?
Ha ha.
Well, I do love a good chorus. I think I'm a pop lover. I really love a great pop song. And a great pop song always has the perfect chorus. And that is really just the perfect journey, you know, the perfect rise and fall and and lift and all of that. So it it's not so much about structure as it is about um peaking and the peak of the story to me happens in the chorus.
Um and then the resolve is also, you know, really important to me the way a song ends. But yeah, great course. I mean you just can't beat it.
And is that an instinctive thing for you? Or is it more of a conscious process of sort of shaping the melody to ensure you get that big lift?
It's gotta fly and every flight, you know, reaches uh it's ideal height and that is always to me displayed in the chorus. I love my bridges too though. Bridges are like kind of essential for me in a song because the bridge always wraps up the story. Like that's the opportunity to say everything you didn't get to say in the verse and the chorus. It is the moment to explain yourself.
I always look at it that way. It's like, okay, what I'm trying to say here to sum it all up, that always happens in the bridge. And musically, it's the great departure that is always so refreshing too. It's the unexpected. I love the unexpected. And the bridge always gives you the opportunity to go somewhere unexpected. I love that about bridges. Choruses, of course, are always the most catchy moments and probably it dominates the maybe the hit factor in a song, you know, the chorus.
I mean, for me personally, the chorus does not need to be the lyric hook.
Oh Rice, okay.
It doesn't have to be the story hook. It doesn't even need a lyric really. I think it's more just a peek It's gotta rise above everything else in the song in order to really take you there. The melody is probably more important to me and the phrasing so that you can sing along with it or la la la along with it or whatever it is.
The lyric hook can be just in one sentence. It can be like two words or three words. I mean, like man, I feel like a woman. You know, that was really just a statement at the end of the course. And that is not the course, but that is the hook. So like I mean, I think the thing that people sing along most within that song is the uh uh uh, which is not a lyric, and then the resolve, which is
Spoken, man if like a woman. And everything in between, I think, is just a karaoke thing that you read off the screen.
Yeah.
¶ First-Time Collaborative Songwriting
And we touched on the uh the collaborative aspect of of the album. Um we were looking at the credits and we noticed uh Ian Archer in there and um Jack Savaretti. who's been on this podcast actually a a few years ago. How did these collaborations sort of come about?
Well, as I said, I was writing so much in isolation, which I do normally anyway, but it was so long extended. And there was this psychological thing about being forced into isolation. that by the time we were allowed to be more than, you know, one or two people in the room, it was exciting to me. And I said to the A and R department, I'm like totally ready
to get in the room with other creatives and just see what happens. I've never done it before. It would be a new experience. I don't know how I will react. I don't know if I'll be good at it, if it's going to be productive or not, but I'd love to try it. So let's see what happens. I'm really excited about the unknown and
And every scenario was so productive and amazing. There wasn't a bad or wrong group. I think it was just I was so ready for it. And it was a creative environment. We were building and we were exchanging actual ideas. So I really thrived. You know, we all thrived together in that environment. The arrangements all came together, just all came together, like the production, the arrangements, everything. It was it was very exciting. And so much of the original work that we did in those
Sessions are on the record. Um it was really about finalizing the songs in many of the cases. It was fabulous.
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So is there a typical way those sessions would unfold? Would you come in with a few ideas in your back pocket and get them to develop them, or were you giving them space to maybe initiate some songs?
Uh, it's true that I didn't leave a lot of space, not because I wanted to dominate the sessions at all, but they they really loved the idea that I had come in with so many ideas because I was overflowing with things. You know, I was already I feel like I'd written three albums in that covid time of isolation and, you know, aloneness in my creativity again, which I really do love and I thrive in that environment. But
I went in there with ideas and they were like, okay, sure, you know, like Waking Up Dreaming and Um Last Day of Sum. I mean, most of the songs were things that I'd well gotten into, I would just start strumming or jangling away on the guitar. And then everybody would just start chiming in and the arrangements started building. Very naturally, and I remember even with best friends and brand new me, I was on the microphone.
that session with both those songs. And I had just recovered from COVID pneumonia and I really was not vocally there yet. But there was a rawness in the vocals that I think came out really well. And those are the vocals we ended up using. I was literally three days out of my COVID recovery and into those sessions with Mark Stenton. Yeah. And we just all picked up our guitars and started jamming out these ideas and just went right to it. So they came together very quickly. I think.
Once you've already been living with ideas for so long on your own, you springboard quite quickly then once you have other people in there that help you wrap it up or are chiming in with, you know, the exact thing that was missing.
¶ Vulnerability & Directing Lyrics
Yeah. There was some nice footage towards the end of your documentary where you were sort of in writing sessions and it did look really exciting.
It so was. I looked so forward to it. I was a little nervous about it because I didn't want to let anybody down. I didn't want to get in the room and go, oh brother, like are they gonna think, what the hell? Like Shania doesn't know what the hell she's doing. Like Or like that they maybe have had expectations of, you know, how I was as a songwriter in the raw, you know, who was I really as a songwriter without production? And nobody actually knew that except for Mud.
the reality of it, you know. So now I was opening myself up, my actual raw, vulnerable songwriter self, to a few groups of of other creatives.
And I suppose you're walking in there as like Triple Diamond songwriter as well, aren't you? So it's nerve wracking for them, but it's nerve wracking for you two.
Well, I was just a little bit worried more about if the way I went about songwriting even related. I didn't know how to write in a group. I didn't even know where to start. So I just started with, Okay, I've got this idea.
Uh, you wanna hear it? So they were also very forthcoming. It was just it really was a lot easier and more natural than I thought. I realized that I guess everybody kind of just works like this. We just sort of start you know, from the ground up and and I think the producers also really appreciate when the artist
comes in with something that is a directive for a song because after all, they are the artist. I really do believe that if you are writing your own music, that you don't want to be interpreting somebody else's song. Otherwise you might as well just get songs sent to you and then and then sing them. But if you're a songwriter, you really get more out of a producer that takes you as a singer, songwriter.
So with that in mind then, does that mean that you'll ultimately end up authoring the lyrics, no matter who you work with on a song, or will you be taking suggestions on words as well?
Oh no, I do take suggestions. I can be a little dominating.
Ha ha ha.
I think I'm pretty easy to get along with. I'd have to sit down with all the writers again now and the producers and talk about it in retrospect. But because I'm the one that is gonna be singing it. I'm pretty clear on what I would say and what I wouldn't say. As a writer, they might think, well, this lyric
you know, I I think this is a strong lyric. I might just say, no, no, that's not great writer. I noticed what I would do is I would ask a lot of questions. Okay, so what would we Really say, or I would set some sort of scenes, and then we would start digging for the right lyrics as opposed to just. throwing in things that maybe rhyme or maybe it was time to
take a left turn. You know, so I was doing a lot of directing. So it might have come across as a little bit bossy sometimes, but it was all fun. I think we we had a lot of laughs and everyone had fabulous ideas to contribute. And musical ideas that really then inspired me also in the moment. I mean I think, you know, it's a mutual inspiration.
🎵 Music
¶ Title Concepts & "Pretty Liar"
And would the song ever spring forth from maybe just a title? Cause you've always had such striking titles, haven't you? Even going way back to to something like God Ain't Gonna Get You for that? You know, you've got the kind of titles that hook a person into the song before they even have heard it.
Yeah. Queen of me is a good one actually. Queen of me. I started that. I was going to write King of Me because I thought, well, okay, I'm not a guy, but if I were a guy I would be the king kind of thing. So I milled that around for a long time and then I finally decided that it would be queen of me. And that was really more because I kept reading things for some reason at that time. You know, Shania's the queen of this, queen of that, whatever.
And I thought, well, I would never say that about myself, but I would say that I'm the queen of myself. So I thought, okay, well that I can say. And then the song built from there.
Waking Up Dreamin''s a good title, isn't it?
Mm.
I like the sort of paradox in there. Anytime you can get something like that into a title, that's a good one, I think.
I did bring that in as a title and a concept because I wanted to write something that was. literally how I think and I am. I'd rather be dreaming when I'm awake so I can navigate my way through my imagination or launch my imagination so that it just goes off into somewhere else. And that one musically really came together very quickly with David Stewart. Wow, I think that song was written in like an hour. Wow. And like demoed in an hour.
And I think that title as well, that concept sort of ties in with creativity as well, doesn't it? Because I think creative people generally spend a lot of their time away with the fairies in their own little fantasy land.
Well, yeah, I mean if you come in with a waking up dreaming and a concept, the song kind of writes itself after that. You just have to pick up some instruments, you know? And when you're in a group with great musicians and a microphone, it just writes itself after that because the spirit of what you're supposed to say is already written. You just gotta not mess it up after that.
Okay.
Yeah, we've had many a guest who's talked about writing songs based on a title or just having a concept evolve from a title, you know.
Completely. I mean, titles, you can take a title in many directions. I mean, you could, I guess, make it a very sad ballad. You know, you wake up dreaming that you hadn't failed, I guess. That's a good twist, another way to look at it. You can write anything in any way you want. I mean, that's kind of the fun about
Writing songs. It's the greatest escape ever. But that one felt for me like enjoying the daydreaming and being uplifted by the fact that you are awake and experiencing so completely this joy and this fact that you can take your imagination anywhere into the
🎵 Music
I suppose Pretty Liar does a sort of similar thing, doesn't it, in just two words. It's got something kind of pleasant and something a little bit negative sort of mixed up together.
Yeah, that one has a bite.
Yeah.
You know, it's a spicy little song and it's kind of got a very typical Shania um sense of humor to it where, you know, the bite is there, but it's all in good humor. Um, I wrote that one quite early on. Pretty liar. That was early on in the whole writing process for this album and the Lila, all of that. Uh that's another good one for the course. I placed myself in a you know pub environment. You know, I was really in that.
Almost
obvious place where, you know, it's loud and there's drinks. You know, you just wanna sing along and let your hair down and sweat and and swear.
Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, well I was gonna say'cause swearing in a song is a kind of a risky gambit anyway. But it works really well in this. It just flows with the chorus, doesn't it? It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, it just it belongs.
It's the only way to say that phrase. That is the way you would say it. It's a very conversational way to say fuck. You know, it's like there's many ways to say it, but that one isn't forced. It's just the way you want to say it naturally.
Yeah. It's a really interesting song'cause it almost takes that sort of liar liar pants on fire kind of idea, but then it twists it into something much more kind of aggressive and more adult. And then'cause the melody kinda keeps climbing through the chorus, it becomes quite tense and I think it's really an interesting song.
Oh yeah. It was a good departure, I thought. It was very refreshing, a little heavier, you know, a little A little darker, a little more um speaking at you kind of thing. I love the bridge on that one. That's one of my favorite B sections. I love the intervals and the harmonies there too. Yeah, that was a really fun bridge to write.
And the course is more nursery rhymish, you know, it's more stick your tongue out kind of thing, which, you know, goes along with the pants on fire. And that was a very fun song to write. And I love it. It's one of the favorites with my friends.
They like to sing along.
¶ Intuition, Study, & Pushing Boundaries
I suppose a lot of these techniques that you've discussed must be so intuitive to you by now that you barely even think about them. Cause I mean you were writing songs from the age of ten, I think.
Yeah. You know, I guess the more you do something, the better you get at it, or at least you hope that's the case. But I think most of what I know about songwriting, other than experience, is what I've listened to, the things you choose to listen to, especially when you're growing up, is your education. So I've studied, you know, I have to say, not to sound like a nerd, but I've
We love nets.
No as you do, but I've studied songwriting. I mean, without being in school, but I've studied the way people say things and I do tend to love obscure lyrics. how people can find new ways of saying the same thing. I just so admire that. And I'm always looking for a lyric or even a chord progression or intervals. I never would have thought of myself. That always blows my mind. I'm always looking to be envious of something someone else wrote that I didn't.
Ha ha ha!
That I didn't yet. And so it pushes me to challenge myself. to be better. So the process for me in writing a song is very much like a puzzle that hasn't been created yet. And that is actually a really good way to put it.
Yeah. You can hear that even in your earlier work, you know, right from the start, that approach to craft and that sort of willingness to kind of push the envelope was there. I think even, you know, you go back to like whose bed have your boots been under and songs like that, even if they're working within the traditions of say the country genre. They're still doing really interesting things within that genre, aren't they?
I mean songwriting is such a wide open space. So you start with these endless possibilities, endless. And that's overwhelming in itself. Because I mean you can just, you know, how do you even know where to start?
let alone how to end or how to build or climax or, you know, you don't know anything yet. So I don't know. I think that it is a skill that you can start to understand and then like you're saying, you know, okay, well you start to understand maybe a genre or genres, you start to understand what people relate to as a way of communication.
So now, okay, this is a way of communicating in the way of a letter or in the way of a poem or in the way of a provocation. Um, maybe you want to provoke a mood or an emotion. So I guess intention. I would say for me, I start with intention. Always. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I always start with intention. Do I want to be happy? Do I want to be sad? What do I want to be inspirational? And that's why even if you have a title or a hook lyric.
you can still go a million places with it. You still have to determine if you want it to be a love song or if you want it to be a hate song or a vents song or a religious song. There's so many decisions to make after that.
And I think that is where the skill starts to come in and experience for me. And then sometimes I am confused about whatever I've learned. Is it from doing it so much or is it from all the studying I've done, you know, just listening to other people's you know, what I think are great.
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I wonder if that's why your mega hits like That Don't Impress Me Much and Man I Feel Like a Woman Songs like that. I wonder if that's why they go over so well, because those messages that you just described, they're just so strong in those songs, aren't they? Whether it's a sense of humor or some sort of social message or whatever it might be, the clarity of those messages is so strong.
That's a good point because I do admit that my intentions are always to be relatable. I'm recording this stuff to communicate and to share and to be on the same page with the listener. I want that. That's what I'm looking for. Otherwise I would just not record it. And I often think to myself, gee, there's a lot of stuff I write where I don't have that intention, where that isn't the driving force. I'm just simply indulging in my own whatever resonates most.
with me in that moment and it may not be relatable at all. And I've never actually tested that. I don't know if I will ever record stuff that I just do, you know, stuff that I just write for the sake of pure resonant pleasure. I don't know. Maybe it would be really too obscure. I imagine it would be unrelatable for the most part, because it's
It's kind of that indulgence state where you're you can kind of go in circles a little bit. I don't know. I've never really allowed myself to do that. And I do record a lot of stuff like that, but I just record it for myself on my own private Pro Tools sessions. Wow.
God, that's so interesting. I never really thought of there being a distinction between those songs that have such meaning for people, like You're Still the One or From This Moment On or the songs that people attach so much meaning to. And songs that you might be crafting for your own purposes, you know, that might have a totally different meaning for you.
Oh yeah, I do that a lot. Just for the sake of creative expression, which is why it may not really make a lot of sense to anyone else even. And sometimes I look at poetry that way and I think, gosh, this makes absolutely no sense. This poem, okay, am I just like not smart enough?
Am I not able to read between the lines? So I think that that is how other people might relate to some of the music that I write. They wouldn't relate. They'd be like, why in the world would she write that? Why would you say that? What does that even mean? And that's okay, you know, because I just indulge it and do it for myself. It's really very fun. It's a place that I like to go as.
And no structured place. Because you know, when you start getting into actually writing a song song, I mean, of course you're thinking about structure. it has to have a beginning, it has to have an end. It's not this never ending story that you put to music. Maybe some of that other writing belongs in a different platform too. Maybe it's more of a scoring kind of thing or a musical kind of thing where the platform is longer and has different arches in different places.
And did the writing process with Mutt on those colossal hits I just mentioned work pretty much the same way as you collaborate with other writers now? Was it just kind of, you know, a face to face thing with guitars?
Oh yeah, I still write exactly the same way as I've always ever written from the age of 10 years old. My own approach to writing is exactly the same. I mean, Mott related to me very well. So that worked out really great. But that was the only person, and that was for 14 years. So it's like When that stopped, it was so important for me to get reunited again with my solo independent, isolated, the writer that I always was, and do an album like that just
To almost find myself again and figure out where I would have landed after all this time. Yeah. And now getting into the room with other people, other creatives, I'm like, huh, it doesn't really matter what the scenario is. I just go about this the same way as I always do.
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¶ Working with Mutt Lang
I think I heard you say somewhere that Mutt was a good sounding board for a song, that if you could get him interested in an idea then you knew you had something.
Exactly. And that applies to so many of the songs that we've done together. I mean, so many. It's ridiculous because we wrote a lot apart. So I never stopped writing by myself when we were working together. He would write by himself, I would write by myself. We were, you know, just doing our own thing. And then we would come together and share ideas. And the sounding board part
was really me throwing things at him because sometimes he would like leave me with a riff. He was so brilliant with riffs. I mean, he's a producer first and foremost. I mean, obviously a legendary one. And so he would throw a rift out at me, or just like two chords, but it would be in a groove. So he would throw a groove out and that would be it. That's all he'd give me. Just that. And then I would.
come back with phrases, lyrics, maybe a title, um, melody. I you know, I would I would start coming back with a more like a singer-songwriter element to his riff, to his thing. And then he would react. either no, it's not that. You know, very, no, try again. And he'd give me his comments and then I'd go back away again. Then I'd come back and and we try again together. Sometimes I'd hit it right on the mark and other times it would be a lot of to and fro.
There would never be any arguments, but sometimes he would, you know, he was so production forward that he would have a maybe a melody or a chord progression in his mind. And I'd be just like, no. My voice will not sit there. I really have to go to the D, or I would just want to go to the minor or whatever. So this is where our true collaboration would start coming together when we would.
really to and fro in person. But the sounding board was always me going away, coming back in with a different idea and bouncing it off him and then going away again and and working on it. Man, I feel like a woman was a really great one. It was a very fast one though because He had this riff going around for days, um, looping it around, looping it around, looping it around, the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Which would end up being the verse. We didn't know not, but he was doing that.
then he finally got into this and then But that was all there was. And then it's like, okay, you just need to come up with something too. Da which has nothing to do with the da da da or the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. So here's these three pieces that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. And I'm shooting in the dark completely. I don't know what the song's supposed to be about. All I know is that it's this tempo he had. Okay, that was great.
So now I'm throwing out everything that phrases to da da da da da da. With no melody or anything. And he's like, no, no, not quite. Yeah, not bad. So within about an hour of doing that at the breakfast table, I said, man, I feel like a woman with no melody. So it was sort of a spoken sung thing. And he's like, yeah.
That's it. So he got so excited. I knew that was it. I was like, oh, finally we can move on. Okay, let's write the rest of the song. The rest is gonna come a lot easier now because now we know what it's about. And we it just, you know, then it took off from there and it was quite fast. So that's a perfect song of what would have been a soundboard start. Where do we go from here kind of thing.
¶ Interview Conclusion & Reflections
Well I guess we're coming to the end of our time, Shania, but thanks so much for sharing all those great stories about the songs. It's such a pleasure to talk to you.
Well, thank you. Thanks for being uh mutual songwriting nerds.
Ha ha ha.
Because we could just like talk about songwriting to no end. It's a lot of fun though.
Ja, we could do this for hours.
I know. Isn't it so great? Yeah, I love it. I mean it's just a passion.
In fact, cancel the press.
I mean it's really quite fun, but I think if you get musical people together though and you say, Okay, we're just gonna talk about songwriting, it would never happen. You'd end up writing songs, you know. But it is fun to just
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A man, a field.
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That was the lovely Shania Twain talking to us about her new album, Queen of Me and her world-conquering hits from the past.
Love that conversation, Bright.
Me too. She sounds really invigorated with her songwriting, doesn't she? And she's still trying to find those amazing moments to create in her songs.
And such a pleasure, isn't it, when someone who's really been there and done it is able to share all the fine details of how they think about their work in process.
Well, that's manna from heaven for us, isn't it? And it's uh it's really great to hear that she's in the midst of such a fertile and creative period.
Yeah, those sessions she described sounded like fun, didn't they?
They really did. And I was really struck by what she said about feeling nervous when she walked into those sessions.
Yeah, it really portrays what a vulnerable thing it is to just write songs, doesn't it?
Yeah, with other people, you know, and and that anxiety about what if the way I do it isn't the way they do it.
Yeah. It's very relatable stuff. Even with all those hits under her belt, she still feels that self consciousness that anyone feels when working with a new person. I mean, that's fascinating to me.
Yeah, me too, and speaking of those hits, it was fabulous to hear those stories of working with Mutt Lang on the songs from Come On Over.
What a peek behind the curtain that was.
Wonderful.
And that album is just so insanely hit laden, isn't it?
It is and you know, what Shanaya told us just goes to show that an album like that is no foregone conclusion. It's the result of a lot of trial and error. You know, going back to the drawing board and reworking and crafting until the song does what you need it to do.
Those diamond sellers don't come easy.
They certainly don't.
So Queen of Me is out now, thanks to Shania for her time and to Katie for setting it up.
We'll be back soon with more nuggets of wisdom from the songwriters you love.
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