Country-pop queen Shania Twain has returned with a new album and world tour, a celebration she conceived after a harrowing battle with COVID-19.
The singer of classics like “Still the One” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” has long had severe asthma, a condition heightened when she contracted coronavirus amid the pandemic.
“With this virus, your lungs just start losing space for air and I was losing that every day. So I was air-vacked to a hospital that had an isolation room, which is difficult to find,” Twain revealed at an album launch event Thursday with TalkShopLive at Fred Segal in West Hollywood. “So many people have gone through it, so many people didn’t make it through it. I certainly didn’t want to center myself … but it’s kind of a group experience we’re all going through together.”
Her health journey inspired the track “Inhale/Exhale AIR” on the new record “Queen of Me,” which she’ll take on the road in the U.S., Europe and her native Canada this year. Snippets were played from the album for an intimate room of Shania superfans, and featured questions from users on TalkShopLive‘s event stream. One departure in Twain’s new music that will have purists clutching pearls and TikTok pumping out duets is the song “Pretty Liar.”
In a song about a duplicitous lover, Twain sings about “pants on fire” and declares he is “such a fucking liar.” The audience noted it was the first time Twain has ever used such colorful language in her songwriting.
“It was one of those lyrics that I thought, there are just some things that have to be said a certain way. I wanted the [Parental Advisory] sticker on there. Obviously, I never write anything to deliberately offend anyone. I’m very conversational when I write lyrics,” Twain said. “I’ve had a lot of pushback in my career [but] I think you just have to stay true to yourself … I feel fearless about that, you have to be yourself and you can’t make everybody happy but the song is definitely very happy.”
TalkShopLive is a social commerce platform that has become the go-to for the entertainment industry, using the tech to launch music, books and dozens of other products in categories like beauty and lifestyle. “Queen of Me” is now streaming on all major music platforms.
