The last time Shania Twain released an album – the experimental country-but-not-quite opus “Up!” – it sold 874,000 copies in its first week and went on to receive the Recording Industry Association of America’s diamond certification for 10 million copies sold, her third album in a row to reach that milestone.
That was in 2002, right around the peak of CDs and an era in which the pop mainstream hadn’t yet fully absorbed hip-hop. Napster had just come and gone. Barack Obama was still a state senator. Taylor Swift had just taken her first trip as a preteen to Nashville.
At that time, Twain was a cross-genre titan, a country singer who – with her then-husband Mutt Lange, the producer who boosted the sound of AC/DC and Def Leppard – made titanic, eclectic music that infuriated Nashville purists with its flashy embrace of pop theatrics but still dominated the charts and made Twain a megastar with a Rolling Stone cover and rotation on MTV. On songs like “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” she was brassy and a little salacious, a feminist triumphalist.
Much has changed in the intervening decade and a half. Pop stars aren’t as grand scaled; country music now takes as givens many of the risks Twain innovated; and Twain divorced Lange following an outlandish tabloid scandal.
And yet Twain is not apprehensive about her return, 15 years later, with her fifth album, “Now,” on Sept. 29. “I really feel like I’m coming back into worlds that I already know,” said the singer, 52.