Twain Gets Ready To Hit Concert Trail

Only a couple of pop/rock queens have exhibited the kind of sales muscle country diva Shania Twain presently flaunts.

Twain has dwarfed her Nashville sisters by selling more than 10 million copies of a single CD, “The Woman in Me.” This’s roughly 6 million more copies than any other country female has been able to sell of a single album, plus another million (and counting) of its successor. And she has accomplished these feats without setting foot on the concert trail, a fact making the achievement doubly prodigious.

In the process, she may be establishing a whole new prototype for the creation and maintenance of megastardom.

Her method?

Radically expand the number of songs on albums as well as the intervals between these albums’ release. Increase the number of planned radio singles from these albums. Put top priority on recording uniquely commercial music rather than on harvesting the profits of concert touring. Aggressively employ TV, rather than concerts, as the primary vehicle to call attention to your music in the marketplace.

And when people think they’ve got your formula figured out, change it. Twain vows not to neglect the road much longer.

“I’m not going to tempt fate a second time,” she says.

Several signs indicate her recently released follow-up package, “Come on Over,” may well out-perform “The Woman In Me.” It got out of the gate much faster, selling its first million copies - and attracting 2 million more orders from retail outlets - in barely more than a month, according to Mercury Records executives.

Mercury-Nashville boss Luke Lewis and senior sales vice president John Grady report:

They plan to release a succession of no less than “at least” 10 radio singles from “Come on Over” (from its total of 16 tracks), meaning the package has every chance of being aggressively represented on radio for most if not all of the next couple of years.

With “Come on Over” (in contrast to “Woman”), Mercury will attempt to take Twain to America’s nearly 1,000 pop stations as well as the 2,500 country ones that were the exclusive players of the songs on “Woman.”

Twain’s long-awaited concert tour, expected to generate substantial new sales, is scheduled to begin in May in her native Canada before crossing the border into the United States the middle of that month.

The only other female performers who have sold 10 million records without living on the road are Mariah Carey and Barbra Streisand.

In Nashville, where concert touring is generally considered the guts of record marketing, the fact that Twain hasn’t toured is all but heresy.

The choice wasn’t without risk, of course.

“The risk I took,” Twain notes, “was that if I hadn’t come up with an album that had (more) hits, then I never would have gotten the chance to tour.”

But both albums turned out to have hits immediately, the first two from “Come on Over” being “Love Gets Me Every Time” and “Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You).” Now the recently-released third single, a slower one titled “You’re Still the One,” is being pushed to both country and non-country stations.

Twain isn’t country in any traditional sense. In her words, “it’s all original music” that comes from inside and then is combined with the production genius of producer/husband Robert J. “Mutt” Lange, the man behind 10 million sellers Def Leppard and Bryan Adams. But even on the latter they seem to work together. One of the most distinctive instances involves the use of three or more fiddles.

“Mutt plays a lot of guitar, and we both get our guitars out when we’re writing this stuff,” she explains. “He writes a lot of the riffs, the musical arrangement stuff. He was doing this with a lot of these songs, and I said, ‘Look, it’s going to sound really rock if you do this on electric guitar. I think it would sound great if you had fiddles doing it - and when I say fiddles I mean like four or five.”’

Twain and Lange recorded “Come on Over” during several weeks in Nashville, but only after months of pre-production during which she and he wrote the songs and then Lange painstakingly arranged them.

Her policy is not to make a record until she has written or co-written the material herself, because that’s the only way the final product will be distinctly hers.

“I’m not a Mariah Carey or a Celine Dion, just a voice that can go out there,” she says. “I’m more of a stylist, more of a singer-songwriter, and I have to do my own music.”

She does indeed have her own style, musical and otherwise. She shocked Nashville with a decision to bare her navel on album covers and in videos.

“Wearing midriff clothes was nothing new to the rest of the world, so I was actually surprised at the reaction,” she recalls.

“More of my record buyers are women - not that men don’t buy my records, too, but it (her music) does seem to relate more to women in a lot of ways. And I think that they’re very appreciative of the fact that I demand to be respected for what I’m thinking and for the way I look.”

She also believes they identify with her sexy indomitability.

“You know, if you go to work in a skirt and your boss puts his hand up your skirt, you don’t then come to work with pants on the next day,” she says.

“You wear a skirt again. You don’t give in and say, ‘Well, I guess I shouldn’t wear skirts to work.’ That’s not the way you change things and turn people’s minds around.

“That’s my take on it. And I think women relate very well to that.”

Obviously.