Shania Twain performing at the halftime show at the Super Bowl. Photo / Getty Images
Shania Twain performing at the halftime show at the Super Bowl. Photo / Getty Images
Country-pop queen Shania Twain debuted a bold new image at yesterday’s People’s Choice Awards, paying homage to one of her most iconic looks on the red carpet before stripping off for a performance that was more Britney than Shania.
Twain, 57, was one of the biggest singers of the ‘90s, with hits like From This Moment On and Man! I Feel Like A Woman from the 1997 album Come On Over, which sold more than 40 million albums worldwide.
She arrived at the People’s Choice Awards wearing a clear tribute to one of that album’s biggest moments: the 1998 music video for That Don’t Impress Me Much, which saw Shania walking the desert in a hooded, leopard-print outfit, her usual dark locks covered by a bobbed wig.
But the real transformation came inside the event, when Twain took to the stage for a career-spanning medley of several of her biggest hits.
Shania Twain at the People's Choice Awards. Photo / AP
She started the performance in sunglasses, a cowboy hat and a floor-length trench coat, but peeled off layer after layer until she revealed her new look: Her dark hair dyed bright pink, dancing in a skin-tight, skin-coloured bodysuit.
Twain is currently prepping a new album, Queen Of Me, due for release in early 2023 – she performed the first single, Waking Up Dreaming, as part of her People’s Choice Awards medley.
It’s welcome news for fans of the star, who has only released one album in the past 20 years – 2017′s Now.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to Twain releasing new music was her painful, public divorce from the man who had co-written and produced all of her music.
Shania Twain arrives at the People's Choice Awards. Photo / AP
Twain and producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange married in 1993, and their romantic partnership also produced some of the biggest hits of the ‘90s – Lange’s fingerprints were all over Twain’s glossy, radio-friendly country-pop singles.
But their marriage dissolved amid scandal in 2008, when it emerged that Lange had had an affair with Twain’s best friend, Marie-Anne Thiebaud.
Confronted with the fact her husband and best friend were having an affair, Twain fell into a deep depression. She even emailed her (now former) friend to beg for her husband back.
“I am dying, and I can’t take it anymore. This is killing me. Have mercy,” she wrote.
In her 2011 memoir From This Moment On, she wrote that she barely ate or slept and felt “ready to die”.
The person who broke the news of the affair to Twain was her best friend’s husband, Frederic, who had stumbled across evidence that his wife was cheating with Lange.
Both shattered by their spouses’ betrayal, Twain and Frederic found solace with each other – and soon embarked upon a relationship of their own.
On January 1, 2011, three years after she and Frederic discovered they were both being cheated on by their respective partners, Shania Twain married her ex-best friend’s ex-husband. Mutt and Marie-Anne were not invited to the wedding.
The other big obstacle stopping Twain from resuming her singing career: the stress of the divorce made her quite literally lose her voice.
Following the split, she was diagnosed with dysphonia, a vocal cord disorder that made it difficult for her to speak, let alone sing, and it took years for her voice to recover.
