Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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I was just coming to thread this. 
Could you post some other highlights from the Billboard article? 
On her childhood:
Quote:
Every enduringly successful artist has a survival instinct, but Shania Twain’s is in Joan of Arc territory. Her impoverished childhood in Ontario, detailed in her best-selling memoir From This Moment On, reads like Dickens: parents who didn’t always have money for groceries and moved the family from place to place, sometimes to dodge the rent; five kids who would sleep in dirt-floored basements; a father who would get into violent fights with her mother, who sank into chronic depression. One of Twain’s first attempts at songwriting was titled “Won’t You Come Out to Play” — a plea for her mother to get out of bed.
All that happened before her 22nd year, when Twain was living in Toronto, trying to make it as a singer-songwriter, and got a call that her parents had been killed in a car accident. To support herself and her younger brothers (Twain has one older sister), she took a job in a Las Vegas-style revue in Huntsville, Ontario, where she lived in a cabin with no running water and washed her clothes in a stream. “Music has been my greatest therapy,” reflects Twain, 51, today. “It always has been. It’s a very great friend.”
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She has such a heartbreaking history.
On her debut / sex appeal:
Quote:
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The songs she was assigned for her self-titled debut album were formulaic; the industry’s attitude toward sex at the time prudish. CMT initially banned the video for her first single, “What Made You Say That,” because one of her outfits exposed her midriff.
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Can you imagine? While Madonna was being excommunicated by the Pope for showing her nipples, Shania was getting banned from CMT for showing her belly button.
On the new album:
Quote:
Embarking on her forthcoming record, which she expects to complete before year’s end, without Lange was both liberating and scary. “It was a big leap of courage for me,” she says. “I didn’t know where to begin. I’d write every type of song, every type of lyric, every type of melody. Who is going to say, ‘All right, let’s hone in on this style?’ I didn’t have that direction, whereas with Mutt I did.”
"I do most of my writing in the bathroom,” Twain says with a laugh. “Or in the basement. Or on the beach.” She wrote much of the new album at her house in the Bahamas, though one song was written in a hotel closet. “It’s a strange thing, but I do need that isolation. I need to feel alone and intimate with my thoughts.”
She describes the finished product as “kind of schizophrenic musically,” but maintains she’s “the glue.” Don’t expect a wronged-woman credo like Beyoncé’s Lemonade. “I talk a lot more about pain,” she says, “but I didn’t feel the need to be that literal about anger or hate. It’s very triumphant in the end. I felt like, ‘Whew! I made it through the album! I made it through writing all the songs!’ It was an emotional roller coaster, and the lyrics reflect that.”
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She worked with Matthew Koma.
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