Shania Twain felt “liberated” by her new album.
The 57-year-old country star is known around the world for 1990s hits such as ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman!’ and ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ but released her sixth studio album ‘Queen of Me’ on Friday (03.02.23) and explained that she was finally able to make the kind of music she would listen to herself.
She said: “The playfulness and the pop on the album felt more like the stomp of my childhood. It’s been liberating making the music I want to listen to and dance to without really thinking about genre because there is a bit of everything in there.”
The ‘You’re Still The One’ songstress recently revealed she had been airlifted to hospital as she suffered from a severe case of COVID-19 and was so “frustrated” at being kept away from so many people for so long that she was “so ready” to finally record the album after having written most of it during the pandemic.
She told The Daily Star newspaper’s Wired column: “It was quite serious; I was in a hospital so I was at this point of frustration and wasn’t able to get in a room with more than one of two people.
“I was so ready to record because I had written so much of the album during COVID.”
Meanwhile, the Canadian-born star worked with UK songwriters on ‘Queen of Me’ and went on to explain that she has always felt “less pressure” there than in her home country and believes that audiences would have been more “open-minded” to fellow country megastar Taylor Swift when she first came on the scene in the late 2000s.
“I’ve never done that before. I didn’t know how I’d be but I was open to it because I’d been so isolated from working in any kind of group setting. So now, there are four or five of us in a room at the same time and it was a little bit like brain shock. We loved it and we were finishing two or three songs in each session. I always found the pressure off in the UK, for sure, not having to worry about what my genre was. My role isn’t to create genre-specific songs, I just create the best record I can make. They would have been more open-minded at least for Taylor. I think she is making the music she wants to make.”