Shania Twain

Shania Twain speaks with GAY TIMES about Come On Over's impact, her dedicated LGBTQ+ fanbase and her plans to collaborate with Lil Nas X.

I’m the queen of country, I’m the queen of crossover, I’m the queen of pop-country… Whatever I represent to others means a lot to me and I have a responsibility, so I thought that I should own that title. I Feel Like a Woman, and he’s proud of it. One of the funniest and heartwarming karaoke things is a wife that sits in the audience at a bar, and it’s her husband that gets up and sings Man! Back when you were touring with Come On Over and Up!, I can’t imagine there were a lot of openly queer fans in the audience because of country music’s homophobic history. I was in that mode, my hair was all frizzy and big, and I enjoyed it. It was ahead of its time in a certain way, but I can’t take credit for knowing that because I wouldn’t have known where we were going. When I was doing the country bars as a kid, it was all top 40 country music. I never know if it’s gonna work in the end, all I can do is, ‘Here is what I wanna do, let’s see if we can make it work.’ It’s a dream world. Last Day of Summer is more of a storytelling side of me, very conversational and a little more on the folk side. “I’m realising a lot of things that I’ve wanted to do for a while now on this album.” I Feel Like a Woman!, the Grammy Award-winning collection defied all expectations for a woman in the genre (and music in general) when sales surpassed – wait for it – 40 million; becoming the best-selling country album and the best-selling album of all time by a female artist – a record it still holds.