Kyle: Today we’re talking about “Come On Over” by Shania Twain Let’s go, Cliff.

Cliff: Oh, so you did it? Okay. Man, I’d been planning that for a week, and then you just like

Kyle: Scooped

Cliff: Lucy my ass.

Kyle: Ah.

Cliff: You will not kick the ball, Charlie Brown

Kyle: I don’t wanna do that. That– In the spirit of Shania’s inclusiveness and acceptance, I don’t wanna do that to you

Cliff: Oh, no, I, I loved it. Mostly I thought of how much of a better intro to this podcast just that format would be entirely. Just like instead of having a ZZ Top inspired thing, just like let’s literally just take a ZZ Top riff, have it come in once. We’ll say something like a little whispery, and then we’ll really come in with a big riff.

Yeah.

Kyle: there is rapper level ad libbing or whatever on this record. It’s one of the scores of things I just cannot get over about the “Come On Over” experience, parentheses complimentary. but yeah, I’m down to, hit the “LaGrange” riff and drop it out and just go, “It’s TuneDig.” Maybe we’ll do that. Yeah, maybe we’ll do that as an alt for this one episode

Cliff: But that’s just one example of the energy that this album gave me, which is without a lick of shame, I am stoked every time I put this record on. I am excited. It’s impossible to be in a bad mood and play “Come On Over,” pretty much any of it. You can maybe get away with one song, but it’s not gonna last very long.

And mostly it just gives me a sense of energy that in most cases should probably embarrass me but doesn’t, which is why I have personally advocated for us to talk about this record for a long time. Not that you needed any convincing,

Kyle: That’s true. You have… Well, it’s sort of like Black Sabbath last month, where it’s like, okay, this is the best-selling album of all time by a female artist in music history. It is the single best-selling album of the entire 1990s. It is the album of the decade by objective standards. It’s the best-selling country music album of all time, above even Patsy Cline, however you define country music.

nobody needs to be told to listen to Shania Twain, least of all us. Yeah, hopefully.

Cliff: We will tell the rest of you today.

Kyle: but this is a good reminder, that there’s always more things to appreciate, and probably there’s a lot of things you missed in the ubiquity of a thing. and yeah, it’s hard to be mad at the energy of any record that has four or more exclamation points in its song titles. Song titles which famously most of the time do not have any punctuation. Cliff, you’re wearing a metalcore shirt right now. I know the listeners can’t see, but I was thinking of you a lot as I looked at the song titles when I was listening, ’cause it’s like these could be Fall Out Boy song titles.

This could be… This is pop punk

Cliff: Punctuation in the song title Before Panic! At the Disco made that a normal move. Yeah

Kyle: you do, exclamation mark, don’t, exclamation mark. That’s art school s**t. up

Cliff: And as will become a recurring theme in this episode, decent advice to most of you who are listening

Kyle: I was gonna say title of my memoir. But, uh, yeah, good, good advice to m- mostly to men, but, you know, to, to people of all genders

Cliff: yeah, true. W-we are gonna 51% at least side-eye men because that’s the energy here. But if you get too far away from it and think it’s not 49%, actually men are pretty tight and I’m into you guys, then you’re also gonna miss this, and it’s one of my favorite parts about letting myself dig into this record as an adult.

We’ll talk some more about this, I’m sure, but like even down to the track listing, I started to appreciate how it never spent too long in one of those energies or the other. You, you get the if you wanna touch or ask type stuff, which is capital G good stuff that we’re gonna talk about some as well.

But like it never… It’s not like half the album is like, “And now here are five songs about some s**t that you’re f**king up actually.”

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: It’s more like, “Here’s one. Let’s push. Now pull.” It’s a pull and it’s a push. “I love you a lot and don’t forget that. Like don’t even play like I don’t love you. Also, um, don’t say that to me that way.

Also, I’m pretty stoked to be on the couch with you later.” It’s like, okay. And as a, I gotta admit, as a an almost 40-year-old person who’s been married to someone for a very

Kyle: A long time.

You’re knocking on the door of 20 years married, which

is nuts,

Cliff: that’s right. And like, we like each other, man. Um, and we’ve chosen this and we’ve been through it.

I was surprised at the depth in the songs coming from someone who was in their 20s writing pop love songs at a time and a, a long time ago at that. And to feel some of them now and go, ” I don’t know, man. Damn, I’m kinda crying a little bit right now about this one,” actually this one makes me think a lot about old love, like in a way that country could, um, but they can’t go too many lines without saying something oddly misogynistic in most of those songs, so you, it takes you out of the mood.

And this one’s a little bit more like, “Ah, I can still sing all these words. I like this.” and I, yeah, I, I had odd bouts of sincerity, throughout

Kyle: Yeah. O- only a woman could do a, only a woman could do a great unisex record about, about love it, it seems. I mean, that’s, that’s maybe the hotter take, but where part of me wants to do the like, “My dissertation is about in this essay I will do a political reading of Shania Twain’s ‘Come On Over.'”

Cliff: I’m outta here

Kyle: right. Right.

Cliff: Thank you

Kyle: Obviously, I can’t opine on the experience of anything as a woman, so, I can only sympathize, not empathize with Shania’s perspectives as a woman. But I can, what you and I can both do is talk about how we absorb and interpret this album as a man, because gender is a very important part of this record.

I mean, there are two genders named in the first and most famous song on this album, and it’s such a great thing for gender discourse, expression, all that stuff. And if, if those words, if those nouns make you feel weird at all, then this record’s even more perfect because it puts you in the hot tub away from the iciness of some of those big, weird nouns.

And people have different feelings about Shania Twain over the years because of, you know, is it too much? Is it not enough? Is it whatev– A- any of the s**t that you would project unnecessarily onto a famous person being a vessel for something. All that to say, the same way that I wanted to speak specifically to camps of people around Black Sabbath.

I want men, like specifically cis white dudes like us, to hear that this record is a great Rorschach. However this record makes you feel, you need to think about that. If you feel really good about it, that’s great. If you have a reaction to it in the big 2026, that is something that you need to think about and talk about, mostly with other men.

Don’t make it women’s problem. but it’s a great Rorschach for how you feel about women, and how you feel about women is how you feel about the world. so that, that’s kind of the heaviest that I want to get about it. But I think the r- like when you talk about Shania Twain, to your point, Cliff, you cannot help but have fun, and that is by her design as an artist.

That is her modus operandi as an artist and entertainer. so I don’t want this to be, however many minutes of runtime of cotton candy of like, “Isn’t this fun?” and “Isn’t this great?” and “Didn’t they do a great job with this?” and yada da da da, singing in the rain. Take that little moment of reflection with you as we talk about this stuff.

But I hope ultimately in the spirit of Shania, you find some, deep hidden meaning to use the Nile Rodgers philosophy phrase. I hope it’s a great mirror for you to move through the world. Because the best part about music ever is when you can share it with other people.

Helps you understand yourself and the rest of the world better and connect to the world around you. And if there’s ever a record that you could connect to a stranger with ever, certainly it’s the one that 40 million people at one time owned a physical copy of. as famous a record as has existed, certainly in the Western world, but definitely internationally.

Somebody may not have the same version of these songs as you But then that’s a fun thing in and of itself to talk about

Cliff: Well said. Thanks for laying a jacket over that puddle and walking me through it. No, well said, and I, uh, th- this is not a fake out and then we’re gonna go down the rabbit hole you didn’t. I just, I agree with you. I wrestled and thought about a lot as a result of just taking this record seriously.

Kyle: Yeah. Here go Cliff and Kyle cranking up the woke meter again

Cliff: Listen, I have been singing “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under” to at least three people who know me just like for fun at any given point in my life. So like this is, all of this is extraordinarily sincere as if we could do anything else. But yeah, the context of our current moment and putting these songs inside of them is so obviously funny that it causes reflection.

And to your point, if you miss that reflection, that’s part of something you might ought to think about a little bit. But I will just like, I want to, plus one what you said in terms of if you don’t know how to have fun, you’re gonna miss a lot of stuff. And I think that that’s pretty analogous to things like the gender discourse in general.

I could probably summarize my position on most things by saying, ” Have fun.” I– Whatever, dude. Have fun. Consenting adults, you go have fun together. You stick away from ruining other people’s good time as best you can. That’s pretty much it. And in that sense, I think the ability to receive all of this stuff as both just fun on the surface and conversely, if I want to, a real thinker, is cool.

That makes for interesting pop music, which is otherwise just on its face yeah, I wanna get the earworm in there. I want you to remember it. It’ll be good to listen to all the stuff we normally hear and think about with pop songs that get kinda stuck in the noggin. And this one ran double duty in a really, really cool way because it embedded all those things we’re talking about at a time even before this all felt quite as comfortable to talk about.

But when I expressed that like when this came out, what, 1997? Yeah

Kyle: 4th, 1997.

Cliff: So we were both 11-ish years old at that time. Yeah. The– So when we… Like, this doesn’t happen anymore. This is like now we’ve got the like Ella Langley discourse coming in here. The, the phenomenon of the

Kyle: It’s the most famous song ever and I’ve never heard it

Cliff: Yeah. And yeah now it’s a challenge to me and I will keep

Kyle: Wait, you for real, this is breaking news. You for real never heard the song ever?

Cliff: I’ve, I, I haven’t wanted to bring it up ’cause it feels so insincere, but no. And I have a track record of doing this. I also managed to not hear Adele for a really long time after the world discovered her, but that was my bad.

Kyle: That feels like a totally different

thing

Cliff: That was my bad.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: but point being like the concept of the song is everywhere.

Like no, okay, when I went to the Braves stadium, this record. When I went to NASCAR, this record. When I went to Walmart, and if you’re putting together where did you live growing up, like you probably figured it out there. no, seriously everywhere. Everywhere that had a radio station, and at that time it was even more acceptable, I think, to like, “Oh, do we do pop or country?”

These are equivalent 50/50 chance any place will be playing Star 94 or Y106.7 or whatever it was for a while there.

Kyle: Which, by the way, s- sort of some bleed growing up in the South, but real ideological divide there that Shania bridged. That’s a very important part of this that, like, they sort of mastered the art of genre and went post-genre.

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: You and I have said a million times on this podcast how much we hate the idea of genre and labels.

It just it is what it is. It’s an outward expression of a person. so I don’t wanna go too far. I don’t even wanna, like, engage that discourse too much, but it is worth noting, yes, you could find Shania lots of different places on the dial. Still not a thing to be taken for granted.

Cliff: and to that point, maybe going ahead and mentioning, I mean, some things I didn’t even understand the depth of that I re- that really underscores that phenomenon. It wasn’t just let’s, well, we’re gonna cross the aisle and connect pop and country. And, who knows to the political strategists listening, maybe there is a lesson here.

Instead of aiming for the two people that you see in contrast, you could maybe do what Shania Twain did, which is she eventually talked about how like, “I wasn’t trying to be pop or country. I was trying to be an international artist.”

And in the pursuit of being an international artist, that’s when, and I really don’t even think I realized the depth that this was true until we, you know, have kind of studied for this episode.

But there is an American version of this record and an entirely separate. Not just like a few of the singles are slightly different. 15 out of 16 songs are totally mixed differently on an international version of this record that you could have found at the same time in a lot of different places. And that really captured my attention all of a sudden and helped me to look at it a little different.

It’s not like some sort of mind-blowing strategy, I think we’re so used to, to your point, genres are so limiting that people talk about merging, bending genres, putting two together. And Shania had more of like the, to me it’s more like a sort of Rihanna energy. Like, I don’t really need those words.

I would like to be the biggest, best person of all time at music. How about that? Okay. And once I, I think understood a

Kyle: My genre is great songs It’s like that thing I’ve referenced the ASG sounds like description on MySpace, s**t that sounds f**king good like Cat Power and Slayer.

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: Sounds like Shania Twain

Cliff: Yeah, Shania Twain is Celine Dion fronting Def Leppard and it more or less worked. But seeing that energy then helped me go back and, really truly appreciate the production that I thought I was already appreciating on this pretty pristine pop record that I mean, I don’t know if you disagree, but, hmm, a good 80% of this would still pass today as incredibly good production.

And the remaining 20% of it feels like you only kinda notice it ’cause it’s got a little bit of a synth flavor that got left in the 90s

Kyle: It, it’s a little dated, but it’s– I mean, I’m gonna sound probably like a weird purist asshole, but it’s got more dynamic range and depth than stuff today. It’s not, compressed to sound like it’s supposed to come out of one phone speaker for a TikTok audio. I mean, it’s produced by Mutt Lange, and it’s got some of the best veteran musicians available any-anywhere in the Western world assembled in army-like fashion.

Uh, so yeah, it sounds great, uh, and that’s because Mutt Lange is, as I’ve learned, as exacting a perfectionist producer as has ever existed in the clichéd history of 20th century American music

Cliff: Yep. And, you know, we’ll mention this in a few places, but where- whereas we are often in, in our conversations here tr- trying to conversationally draw out the little… We got little pieces of information about how an album was put together and produced, and we sort of go, “Oh, if you put these two little quotes together and you think about it, oh, we get to figure out how the production ended up so thoughtful,” and, “Wow, it sounded like this sort of by accident, and then they ended up here.”

Th- this one’s like, ” Here is what I did. Here is why it sounds like that. I did that on purpose because I know what I am doing.” And like

Kyle: There’s a whole– You found that whole vintage– It was on a, like, vintage gear, vintage audio something website where they did an interview with one of the studio guys, and he went through, like, literally every microphone, every board, every preamp. There’s more specific information about this than albums that I have been sonically influenced by my whole life.

There’s full-blown “Secret of the Sound” stuff out there about this. So even that signals the level of technical production care that went into this. You know, this is not, like, recorded this s**t in a GarageBand type deal.

Cliff: Extremely no. Extremely no. And there are several examples that we can point out on songs as well, but there’s a lot of… it’s especially cool, man, I’m just asiding myself right now, but it’s especially fascinating to read all of this because it feels like a bygone era now because he was doing all of this with- without computers effectively.

Like still using, and I don’t mean totally without computers, but, uh, several people remark how he is still producing in the sort of old world of telling people exactly what to do, recording hours upon hours of the same riff over and over and over just to try to get exactly the right thing. Bringing in, like you said, incredible world-class studio musicians and saying, “You play this stupid riff for five hours now.”

“Until it feels right to my brain, we’re gonna keep doing it.” And then on top of it, several places where the and this is a, a part of active listening that we can go ahead and bring out now I think. The, the two areas that jump out in terms of that in- intentional production are, one, when you start listening to…

I mean, Shania Twain has a great voice and they produce it well. All that’s pretty obvious. There are a billion vocal tracks on a lot of these

And normally when that happens, it sounds like there’s a billion vocal tracks on it, and it sounds like more of a machine or an electronic version of what someone’s singing.

And instead, the production technique of layering a bunch of voices and then intentionally scooping out all of them except for hers I mean, they are literally going through the s- audio spectrum and saying, “Here’s what goes here. Here’s how you’d notice this here but not here.” So the, the vocals are one, and then the, f-fiddle is kind of like a, a second-class all-star on this record too.

It’s really cool in a number of places, but you’ll also get really thick layers of fiddle. And again, what’s cool about that is it’s not just copy and paste Pro Tools tracks with humanization run. It’s we hired three more fiddlers to come in and play the same thing on top of each other live on purpose to get the natural layering of it.

Kyle: So human that we had to give them a nickname, the Beau Bros

Cliff: So, lots of gold at the end of this rainbow, so to speak. Like I, I have enjoyed trying to challenge why I would enjoy this record or what, why it would be interesting beyond what we already knew about it, which was that it’s cool, it sounds good, it’s fun, and if you listen to it a few times, at least six of these songs will be in your head for the next three weeks.

All that’s good. Some of that’s enough to make it an interesting record, but there’s a lot more here e- even under each song.

Kyle: There’s a lot to talk about with the record itself, and this is one of the rare instances where I feel like even just the Wikipedia page for the album itself is an actual treasure trove. Whereas normally you gotta search around a bunch of other places. This one’s really tight and has a bunch of stuff in it.

I would like to hit just a couple of background points, pre-record, that I think enrich the experience of listening to the record, to the cold listen. Cause this is one where it’s very hard to have a cold listen. Like, if you’ve never heard a single song from this record, wowza. Congratulations. so Shania Twain, darling of Canada, growing up in rural Ontario.

For fans of Letterkenny and Shoresy, the “Come On Over” tour, the headlining tour began in Sudbury, Ontario. she played gigs starting as a child, including last call appearances at bars at her parents’ behest. she had to look after her four siblings starting at the age of 21 because her parents died in a car crash, and supported the family by singing in a variety revue at a resort.

And she put out her first record, self-titled, in ’93. Kind of failed to make a splash. I think there’s a lot of great stuff about her ascent, but, Mutt Lange heard that record, called her, was like, “I’d love to work with you. You’re great.” And they wound up hitting it off, and obviously their partnership blossomed into a lot more, but it was founded at first on a foundation of mutual respect and admiration.

Second record is “The Woman in Me,” and if nothing else had happened in her career after this record, still a monumental achievement. Kind of flooring when I look back at it. It’s got “Any Man of Mine,” ” Whose Bed Every Boot’s Been Under,” and

Cliff: If you’re not in it for love

Kyle: If you’re not in it for love and no one needs to know 12 songs on this record, 50 minutes. A bit on the beefy end for a country record, mid-90s. The other thing I’m– I think it is, like, important to draw back into the front of your mind, ’95, ’96, ’97, is there’s a, I’m gonna call it weird era of mainstreaming feminism.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna call it weird ’cause it’s, like, sorta but not quite, you know? There’s, there’s some good stuff, but it’s also, like, kind of a commodification of feminism. Like girl– think girl power, Spice Girls. It’s kind of the girl boss era. You know, you, you can do it as long as you’re a boss earning capital for the market type thing. but there’s a lot of incredible female artists coming out of the woodwork. “Jagged Little Pill” is a huge record. Uh, “Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” is a huge record around this time. No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” with Gwen Stefani is an enormous record around this time. obviously the Spice Girls are one of the biggest things in the world.

especially when you look back at music history in an era… Like, you talk about ’94, ’95, ’96, most of the time the mind defaults to grunge and male artists and all of that sort of thing. But I think it’s very important to note, and, and this is, like, around the era when it’s immediately pre, I guess, Lilith Fair.

but there’s also, you know, your PJ Harveys and all that sort of stuff out there in the culture. so it is, like, an interesting and exciting time for women making music, but they are all fighting against boys club bullshit. There’s very much a vibe of that happening in this time. So, “Woman in Me” comes out in ’95.

Mega bangers. She does not tour on this record because she’s like, ” I got more in the tank. I wanna go work on this new record.” And everybody was like, “That’s ’cause she’s not good live. She can’t live up to the hype.” And over the course of ‘ 95, ’96, writes these songs by herself and with Mutt Lange, and then goes into the studio.

correct me if I’m wrong, I think it only wound up being, like, three weeks in the studio

Cliff: Yeah, it was chopped up into a few different types of recording, but yeah, I think her section was pretty quick

Kyle: for the exacting nature of the craft, and really that’s the word that keeps coming back into my mind is craft or songcraft, is like this is, you know how we were talking about craft ice cream for a while out there in the culture. This is craft pop music. This is farm-to-table, best quality ingredients you can get pop music.

it’s engineered to be the best version of itself it can possibly be, but it’s like just quality protein top to bottom made by a family-owned company that cares. It’s sort of an unfathomable combination of ingredients in today’s day and age. so that brings us up to this record.

Anything that I missed that was interesting to you contextually?

Cliff: The only thing that I thought was interesting about, you mentioned, so the recording happening in about three weeks, and then I mentioned that the sort of broader writing and recording timeframe was more like four months. But one interesting note about it, and we have a hard time extrapolating people’s intention a lot of times.

Again, here, very clear. Someone who had very clear intentions and talked a lot about them. The budget that was proposed for this recording was, uh, apparently not accepted by the record label. So this actually became, in part, personally financed by Mutt,

like

Kyle: I didn’t know that part

Cliff: a huge production budget. And there’s…

at least we couldn’t find a specific number for the production budget or what it ended up being on this one. But for context, I mean, it was half a million for “The Woman in Me” before that. So

Kyle: Huge relative to that

Cliff: yes. Huge

Kyle: would, a number you’d never get in this century

Cliff: Yeah. Half a mil and they got, you know, “The Woman in Me” is like 12 times platinum or something.

So it’s a pretty good return on investment. So whatever he was asking for must have been pretty wild. But again, we can project a little bit of intention onto like… But if dude is spending his own money at making this thing happen, there’s at least conviction there. Right, wrong, indifferent, whatever, there’s conviction about making it work.

and, and we get to feel the reward of that for sure.

Kyle: And you pointed out to me that she had said the reason that there’s so many songs on this album is because she said, “Well, if it’s my last album I ever get to make, I wanna throw everything at it that I can.” by country music standards, this is a double album.

Cliff: Yes

Kyle: 60 minutes and it’s 16 songs, and the standard…

I know you’ll read stuff out there about this when you’re reading about this album and they’ll say 10 to 12, 40 minutes, but like if we’re being honest, it’s really more in the classic rock realm, in the early mid-90s of eight or nine songs, 30 to 35 minutes. And it’s only because of the CD format and sales and stuff is it starting to push up from that.

But you think about Brooks & Dunn from, was that… How early in the 90s was that? Not terribly long before this record, to my recollection. much shorter than this record. So that alone, 16 songs at one hour, is sort of staggering. But then the counterweight for that that’s so interesting to me and the thing that continues to blow my mind, one, one of the things that continues to blow my mind about this record is the life cycle, the half-life of this album that she first performed some songs I think as early as ’96.

but the record comes out in ’97 and lasts through middle of the year 2000. Of the 16 songs on this record, 12 are released as singles, which is gobsmacking in and of itself, and the last one I think was in July of 2000. The tour, the full headlining tour, not counting all the smattering of like stadiums and cool stuff that she did after that, but there was a hardcore like 170-date arena tour for 18 months.

they made hay out of this record. You wanna talk about return on investment. She basically did a two-album cycle in one with this thing. But the real miracle of it is coming up with two albums worth of A-grade material all at once. So like Intention or no, even a subconscious belief that you’re onto something that big.

We talked about it with Illmatic. They honed that record and honed that record because they knew they were onto maybe a watershed moment. But Illmatic had a l- a lot fewer songs than “Come On Over” does. There’s like an elite athlete thing to that whole, to the whole mentality of the shape of this record.

Cliff: To that end, I’d love to mention briefly, we talked last episode about Black Sabbath’s confounding of the critics at the time, including some very funny responses. This one’s funnier because You have the classic inversion of appreciation over time type deal that’s happening for the most part, with the exception of a couple of people who are just like, “No, no, I got this. This is gonna be good.” And one of them, hilariously, so like we, we love pulling Robert Christgau’s responses, uh, and, and use Black Sabbath’s to start with.

Kyle: I I hope you will please read this whole thing right now. Do you have it?

Cliff: Aside from its quota of musical sound effects, Twain’s latest incarnation obviously has nothing to do with country. Setting out into the vast unexplored territory separating Garth from Madonna, she and husband producer co-writer, Mutt Lange, glance over at Gwen Stefani and take a few tips from Lange’s old charges, The Cars, before arriving at a new pop formula that’s all flirtatious ebullience and lively hooks.

Is that how to say that word?

Kyle: Ebullience?

Cliff: And We’ll call it. Last sentence, And miraculously, this discovery proves more exhilarating than a barrel of orgasms. The happy kind. None of your soul-shaking groaners. Not while this incarnation has juice anyway. A minus.”

Kyle: What does that even mean, man?

Cliff: I don’t know. I was only going to say he mentions it has nothing to do with country, A minus, but I’m so glad that you challenged my on-the-spot reading skills with some of those words.

Kyle: Hmm. I just am picturing some R. Lee Ermey type character being like, “This is more fun than a barrel of orgasms.” I

Cliff: that’s the type of sentence where it’s like you’re about to say Neutral Milk Hotel in the next three sentences no matter what we’re talking about. I need to leave

Kyle: Speaking of things that are a Rorschach test if you like them, men. I copied and pasted the critical reception section of this album’s Wikipedia page and changed the headline to “People Don’t Know S**t.” And I’d like to read that one now as well. “Reviews in the ‘Dayton Daily News,’ the ‘Philadelphia Inquirer,’ the ‘Vancouver Sun,’ and the ‘Washington Post’ praised the album’s mainstream appeal and catchy melodies and touted Lang’s production.

Other reviews from the ‘Atlanta Journal-Constitution,’ ‘A,’ the ‘Austin American-Statesman,’ the ‘New York Daily News,’ and ‘Q’ were negative, dismissing the album as, quote, ‘unforgivably bland, forgettable, and uninspired.’ Twain’s lyrical content drew criticism for lacking depth.” Wow, so, uh, up with the guy, down with the lady.

Twain’s lyrical content drew criticism for lacking depth, and some called it, quote, ‘predictable,’ the ‘Los Angeles Times,’ and ‘clichéd,’ the ‘Springfield News-Leader.’ Hussey opined that Twain avoided controversy.” Hussey is Allison Hussey, who wrote a great review retrospective of “Come On Over” for Pitchfork, unfortunately, in 2021.

Definitely worth a read. Thank you, Allison Hussey, for your great and incisive writing. ” Allison Hussey opined that Twain avoided controversy and was the first to insist that her songs are meant to be fun, and it is okay to enjoy them on those terms alone. In the ‘Miami Herald,’ Ho-Howard Cohen disliked the album’s, quote, ‘lazy production and insipid lyrics,’ but complimented the international version for removing the, quote, ‘forced country instrumentation and revealing the finely crafted pop it really is.’

The ‘Sydney Morning Herald’s’ Marty Taglioni and the ‘Guardian’s’ Adam Sweeting were critical, deeming the international version’s production overly polished and manufactured.” Opinions really are like assholes It’s just fun to read that paragraph for the whiplash of, “Well, guys, which is it? Which is it, huh?” Everybody’s got something to say. All this time talking trash.

Cliff: I like women, but they’re mean to me. How do I deal with this?

Kyle: Another thing to talk to a therapist about. But I kinda like it

Cliff: Of course you do, man. You’re so close to getting it. You’re so close. Oh

Kyle: On the next episode of Shania Twain, Sigmund Freud would like a word

Cliff: Oh my God. I would love to sit and talk with Shania, the two of us and Shania Twain talking about gender and relationship issues together

Kyle: I have not been super pleased with, People are asking her those questions more pointedly in this decade now that we have more of the vocabulary in culture about it. And I, I ascribe her views on it to be like, her vocabulary on it to be kind of generational. It’s like, well, the data, your actions are all there in the music, so I’m gonna, I’m gonna take that as more than the weight of what you say on a couch to a stranger in a mediated situation that you do not know

Cliff: Hmm.

Kyle: But I look at a,

I…

Cliff: we would agree. Okay?

Kyle: It would be a way to spend a Saturday, not a thing that I would enjoy

Cliff: Yes. Well, yeah. Type 2 Fun with TuneDig and Shania

Kyle: Type two fun. Fun in America B with Cliff and Kyle, the new show on Vice

Cliff: Pearls Before Swine. Somebody hire us. One thing I do love about this, and if this is, uh, a transition and that needs steps between it, fine. I also just like wanna talk about these songs. They’re sick. They have details in them. They’re like really, really well done in specific places

and

Kyle: Compositional sophistication.

Cliff: Yeah. In, in pulling out the places that I think might be looked over now, right?

Listening to a record like this, especially because, yeah, I mean, you do you. I would support you for sure if you did this. This is less of a like eyes closed, palms up. I’m, I am now in this for 60 minutes. Like you can dude, for sure. If there’s anything

Kyle: Yeah, you’re not gonna come on over to Satchidananda

Cliff: Bow. Come on, girls.

Kyle: She did wear a bindi in one video, which, you know, didn’t love. But Sanchita none, but this is

Cliff: Oh. And now I’m just thinking about how I got to see Robbie Coltrane recently and…

Kyle: Thanks for the heads up, Kyle

Cliff: No, absolutely. Get you a Kyle in your life, a person who talks to you like, “If you don’t get to this, we are not friends.”

Kyle: but I didn’t even know he was touring until I saw somebody’s– I’m not on Instagram, but TuneDig is on Instagram, so like the only content I ever get is music content, which, you know, if you gotta be on the internet, that’s the way to do it. but somebody posted about seeing Robbie Coltrane, and I wanna say it was like a Matt Sweeney type dude, just like a killer musician person, and I was like, “I wonder if he’s coming to Atlanta,” and then I’m immediately prepared to get my heart broken, ’cause that’s how it goes.

But it’s like now at least when I see somebody who’s not coming to Atlanta, most of the time they’re coming to Denver and one of us can enjoy. And if one of us in this relationship can enjoy it, then that’s good enough for everybody. Much like the songs of Shania Twain, the, the subject matter of Shania Twain songs

Okay. Before we get into the songs, I do think from a technical perspective, we talked about the perfectionism of Mutt Lange. Mutt Lange’s pedigree is, he did three absolutely killer AC/DC records, “Highway to Hell,” “Back in Black,” and “For Those About to Rock We Salute You.” He did three or four Def Leppard records, you know, peak Def Leppard, “Hysteria,” “Pyromania.”

He did a record by The Outlaws. He did, um, one of the early ’80s records for The Cars. He did Foreigner’s “4.” He did some Bryan Adams stuff, including the seminal “Everything I Do, I Do It for You” floating at song from “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.” Uh, he produced Billy Ocean, Michael Bolton. He also produced Nickelback’s “Dark Horse” and Maroon 5’s “Hands All Over,” do with that what you will.

he produced tracks for Tina Turner, the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga. He wrote or co-wrote dozens, if not hundreds of songs over four decades. He, also his Wikipedia will tell you he is a follower of the egalitarian teachings of Sant Mat, sort of a like Sikh Sufi mystic. He’s very reclusive. He hasn’t given interviews in decades. kind of an interesting guy, crazy pedigree. a lot of the stylistic approach to production on this record apparently was inspired by Motown, like big super honed pop hit factory. You mentioned what they called programming humans.

Dan Huff, who was the session guitarist on this, talked about how he was exacting, like we’d work on eight bars for hours, but also he was that way on every instrument. And they really were. They both had input on the sonics of this thing. For drums, Paul Laim, L-E-I-M, sorry if I mispronounced that, recorded drums for up-tempo tracks in a room featuring a stone floor and reflective rock walls, but he shifted to small dead booths for ballads.

and then for fiddle, we talked about the quadruple fiddle players. That was Rob Hajacos, Joe Spivey, Glen Duncan, and Aubrey Haynie playing the same parts in unison. and for bass, Mutt Lange supplemented synth bass tracks by recording a muted dead bass string struck with a guitar pick to give the low end a punchy and percussive attack.

So you’re probably going in mostly for songcraft because these songs are extremely catchy and the Shania of it all is going to be the first thing you notice. But we always talk about what do you do with the first listen, the cold listen? Take Shania out of the equation entirely. if you’re inclined to really fall in love with that aspect or to not be into it, just focus on the music for a bit and there’s a lot to chew on in there.

And then you can do the opposite of whatever you did the first time, the second time.

Cliff: If you’re a person who’s ever talked about how cool Steely Dan is for getting it right, you better f**king love this record. I wanna hear it ‘ Cause it’s awesome. Yeah, there’s a lot of layers in here. There’s, there’s a quality of instrumentation playing that almost doesn’t belong here.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: and then though, because of that production does require a combo of either loud good stereo or decent headphones so that you can actually pick out…

I mean, he’s, I say he, uh, that’s sort of like a, a royal for that whole approach at this point, but there are instruments hiding in like stage left over here dur- just during this part. and, and we’ll get to this as well, but e- even on one of the choruses, you can start to draw out in stereo if you’re listening closely that there’s a, there’s this really subtle guitar work over on far left-hand side and over on the right your ear’s being blasted with like a rotary.

And on paper makes no sense, and then you go, “Well, that’s the chorus of a song that I know.” it’s really deeply, genuinely cool. I won’t say that 100% of all the songs are equally interesting on this level, so I’ll try to, you know, draw out the ones that I notice them on. But they’re like… But none of them are, first of all, none of them are bad or uninteresting.

They’re just less complicated and interesting than some of the other ones if you catch them.

But yet another record that really started to show itself differently depending on where I listened to it and helped me to recall and remember that when I heard a thing everywhere, so to speak, that means I was hearing the majority of like that audio that I can hear easily in a big space, right?

A song’s gonna sound different in a stadium, in a grocery store, whatever, than it does in your headphones. And I had, in my memory, flattened a lot of these songs into the pop hooks

Kyle: Yeah,

Cliff: and, sort of imagined a simpler version behind them, and there’s a lot more here, which is cool.

Kyle: Same.

Cliff: one direct example. I told you we got a lot of, like, quotes and intention about this, which is cool. But to lead in from where we were just talking about, so the songs in particular, and to reinforce why it’s worth listening to. So a quote from Mutt: “On ‘Come On Over,’ we spent a lot of time making sure that every sound was set evenly,” quote, “on the front of the monitor.

This was not just micing and EQ, but it was every detail down to how the guitar players held the pick and where they struck the string. When you combine those details with a very tight track that has the right parts and inversions and a great feel, it created a sonic space that opened up and allowed everything to be heard.” We’ve talked before about people who sort of like understand things at a level that most of us are just like, “That must be neat.” This is one of those. he’s using like spatial terminology to talk about a thing that he sort of reverse engineered from getting human beings to behave in a certain way.

Like this is top-of-the-line type stuff. Very, just deeply impressive intention. I have no reason not to just go from the top, so that’s what I’m gonna do here, if

Kyle: Buddy, if ever there were a record to start with track one on, good, good God, it’s this

one

Cliff: Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, as I say

Kyle: Seven notes to define the decade. It was this one for the 90s and “Seven Nation Army” for the 2000s

Cliff: And the more, the more you listen to it, the more uncertain you become about what instrument that has been played on. What is that noise? I know the tone of it, but I can’t quite tell what it feels like anymore. I think I’ve looked at it too long and now the word doesn’t seem like it’s spelled right anymore, and it doesn’t…

It’s fascinating. My favorite part though, which I like wrote down before I even listened to this the first time because my inner child said, “Don’t you forget to say this,” is that the guitar solo on this rec- or on this song has no business being this good and rips. And obviously we’ve already sort of mentioned that there is a, a serious rock influence, like traditional specific like rock as defined especially in that moment.

We– I made a Def Leppard reference earlier. That’s because Shania Twain references Def Leppard a lot and used to sing Def Leppard songs. there’s a conceptualization of what rock means that got ported through into the production and studio work of a lot of these songs, it’s just really good.

Like I, I don’t know how to express, especially as a guitar player, you could have coasted here easily. There will be several more moments like this throughout the record that I point out, which were great. You could have coasted on this. It could have been really simple. It still would’ve worked. It wouldn’t have taken anything away from the song.

And instead I’d love to know if there are 50 other takes of this, ’cause this really feels like, “Hey, why don’t you rip on this until you’re like, ‘That was so good. My guitar is getting put down now.'”

Kyle: It is a great solo. I actually didn’t even write down a note about the solo because there’s so many other songs where there’s great ones, and I’ve heard this song a thousand times. But it is a, it is a great solo. What is– Dan Huff is the guitarist’s name? Yeah. Superstar. There’s so many moves on this record where they– it’s very clear that they decided what the obvious thing to do would be, and they did a slightly different thing at micro and macro levels.

And this is ano- this has become another deeply held belief of mine with regard to this record. One, they make stylistic choices in the way that they play, you know, deliver, arrange, but mostly play parts on this record that are designed to have familiarity. They have a feel, y- maybe for the country of it all, but for sort of the pop digestibility of it all.

But it’s also good, you know? There’s, like, a turning to side stage to the other musicians wink type of thing. Like, “I could do something really crazy here, but I’m gonna do just enough just different enough.” There’s micro moments like that all over this record where it’s like, okay, none of those would’ve been my first three choices exactly, the place that you took that.

There’s another guitar example later in the record that’s even more standout, but I think, man, I feel like “A Woman” is a, a great example as well. But then on a macro level, I just have this nagging feeling that there’s little nods all over the record to other music to other big pop songs. the first example right away on the record, “Holding On To Love,” the next song, the intro lick is “Running Down a Dream” by Tom Petty.

And for more songs than I don’t, I have a, “This reminds me of,” or, “This feels like this,” and I’ll name them as we go through. But it’s not even quite to the level of interpolation. It’s just a wink, and all, all done in a way that suggests to me that these people have an extensive vocabulary in music, like church players, like session players, and can just Obama doing a three-pointer in the gym, like, “Watch this.”

Or is that, I’m thinking of George Bush doing, “Now watch this drive.” there, there’s a lot of that in here. and it’s like that’s a really smart way to push pop forward, And you contrast it with now, where there’s just a lot of straight recycling of nostalgia, you know? A lot of the feeling in pop music is the slow cancellation of the future phenomenon, remakes of movies, and rehashing of old beats, like d- beyond samples, just karaoke-ing over things.

There’s very professional… I don’t even know it’s, if it’s homage. You know? Like you and I are projecting a lot of intention maybe. Another reason that I would be fascinated to get the crew together and talk about this album on a deep, deep level, which again is like way more of a conversation than you should be able to have about a big capital P pop record makes it great.

The deceptive amount of depth. Any part of the creation or execution of this record that you shine a light on, there’s a bunch of questions I would be Either one of us, I think, would be excited to go ask like a five-year-old, like tug on their pant leg and be like, “Hey, hey, tell me all about this.”

Cliff: To your point, they must have been signaling things that other people picked up, ’cause one thing that did surprise me, going back to the opening track, multiple people at the time of the release said this reminds them of “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum. O- y- okay. Sure. The fact that independent people came to that conclusion means that a f- a feeler must have been sent out that I was not calibrated to receive, but that other people were.

So yeah, like it, it feels like there’s moves that are being signaled and winked at throughout all of this by clearly, like almost overly competent people. and I think it’s probably safe to say on top of Shania saying she’s gonna use this record to shove as many songs inside of as she can before she doesn’t have a chance to make it again, the musicians, to your point, seem to be kind of shoving the most that they can into every opportunity they had, which is cool.

Hopefully that feels like a payoff for those musicians relative to what they all said was pretty strenuous and specific, uh, approaches to recording all these things.

Kyle: I don’t have much more substantive stuff to say on “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” but lightning round on it, four things. One, this is the eighth single promoted from this record insane Eight. Eight. Not three, not four, not five, eight deep in the cycle. Let’s see when it was put out. Released as a single in March of 1999.

The first single put out was “Love Gets Me Every Time,” released September of 1997. So like we’d been through almost two full grades, two full school years had almost completed for us between the release of those two singles. and then with, with regard to that being a single, this is a music video that if you’ve never watched it, pause the tape right now and go watch the video on a television, on a big large screen like we would’ve been able to do back in little old 1999.

It is one of those decade-defining iconic music videos, and it’s still every bit as good as it was back then. As iconic a music video as you’re ever gonna see. So eighth single, iconic music video. Third is about the inspiration. It was inspired by watching drag performers while Shania was wa- working at a resort in Huntsville, Ontario.

Rorschach moment right there, buddy. she told British Vogue in 2023, ” It is the moment to celebrate that as women you can have as much masculinity and femininity as you want in your vibe.” As Dan Levy would say, I’m into the wine, not the bottle.” if you have experienced e- ego death, you know that everything is an energy.

Man, I feel like a woman a lot of the time as well. I feel you, Shania. Four, and finally, Cliff, I’m making eye contact with you when I say this Is this one of the best songs ever made?

Cliff: Holy s**t

Kyle: Like, by anyone

Cliff: I, my defenses don’t come up immediately. there are buildings I’d feel comfortable building that I could stand in and agree with you in, yes.

Kyle: I’m like m- maybe this is one of the best songs that anyone’s ever made, period And what specifically made that sensation wash over my full body recently is I once again saw a band we love, He Is Legend, and they came out on stage to this song. A band of, a band of five of the gnarliest unwashed dudes from North Carolina you could possibly imagine, nothing about them reads as feminine in any way, coming out to “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” full blast, and their audience of equally unwashed mostly dudes singing top of their lungs full blast to the song. And they’re playing it like Slayer loud in the venue, c- clearly at a volume that it was an instruction to play it at this volume, and people can still be heard singing over it, and they cut it out for the whoa-oh-ohs for people to sing acapella, deafening, louder than anything people sang of their actual lyrics during the set.

And that’s not a diss to He Is Legend, that is a compliment to Shania Twain and an audience full of people who you would not think would be into this song for either structural or religious reasons. it was a unifier

This song has like maggot brain level mojo. Th- there is a, there’s something in this song. There, there is a clear we nailed it in this song If I had to make a list outside of personal preference, most meaningful songs to me, if somebody was like, “What are the best songs people have made? what are songs that show you what music can do?” I think I would put this on the short list

Cliff: I’m not offended by this idea at all Certainly got the hallmarks of it, including the fact that right now your brain can do that opening riff now. You can do it. You remember it, and it’s not exactly like anything else. Ugh. Yeah, all those things.

Kyle: And no matter your gender or posture or whatever, the three words, “Let’s go, girls,” get you f**king going. No one knows what it means

Cliff: I was gonna say it, it is the greatest pit call in history

Kyle: Truly, truly. And she’s got, again, she’s got a lot of those great ad libs to kick the songs off, but ” Let’s go girls” might be three of the mo- the most inciting three-word sequence. I struggle to think of an equivalent of just like almost a toss-off thing that has so much potency in a song

Cliff: Nope, not at all. But it does give me a small chance to shout out a thing that happened near me in Denver recently. The Sex Pistols played here and whatever. Whatever

Kyle: With, uh, Frank Carter from Gallows now on vocals?

Cliff: S- So speaking of Frank, have you heard about this?

Kyle: No.

Cliff: Okay, this is great.

Kyle: But by the way, he’s terrifying. I, love him. He’s great. I– are you gonna tell me a good story or

Cliff: Oh, yes. Yes, I am. This is a very good setup.

Yes. Okay,

Kyle: If you were like, “Frank Carter killed a guy in Denver last week”

Cliff: uh, you will see a body. at the O, Ogden Theatre down the street, they play there. Frank Carter initiates a women’s only mosh pit and declares it. One dude declares that he has a problem with this, and we had a show-stopping Frank Carter engaging with that individual until you leave level thing, and then a follow-up on the internet that’s just like, “Listen the f**k up about this.

I never wanna hear s**t from other people about it. I never wanna see this again.” Dude, this was… This hit so hard, the father of the person who did this wrote Frank a message apologizing, saying he was embarrassed for his kid.

Kyle: Oh my God

Cliff: every now and then we get a glimmer of what we’re looking for, and this is what we’re looking for. Truly delicious stuff,

Kyle: I heard the call to “Let’s go, girls,” and emphatically responded, “No.”

Cliff: “But what

Kyle: And then the girls killed me.

Cliff: thought. I’m

not a

girls.

Kyle: I’m not gross.

Cliff: not girls

Kyle: Oh, in the words of Bryan Cranston when he won his Emmy: “Finally, an old white man gets a break.”

Cliff: Al- also speaking of, undercover secret handshakes from a couple of dudes who have been married to pretty kickass women for a pretty long time, we’ve not been, um, doing a bad job ourselves, okay? So we’re coming from a place a lot of you wanna be, if you can receive this from us. Anytime a girl s- a woman says to others, “Let’s go, girls,” you’re gonna wanna be allowed in that group,

Kyle: Yeah, for sure

Cliff: You d- f**king pay attention, man. Like, It’s not an exclusion. It’s like a e- either you’re invited or you’re not, but you want to be, if invited, allowed and happy. You– If, if someone says, “Let’s go, girls,” and you walk in and they go, “Yes, that’s right,” you are doing something correct. You are aligned if you are invited there and people are excited to see you.

If, again, if this triggers something in you that’s like, “Well, someone’s doing something without me. They’re not appreciating me,” I need you to, like, manifest this f**king Shania Twain record, man.

Kyle: There is no, there’s no better compliment as a man than to be a safe man for women. There’s no better thing you can be in this world than to be safe to women and children. and if you have a knee-jerk reaction to that, then I have a specific recommendation for a thing you can do that I’m not going to say on a recording. But you can call me personally and I’ll tell you to your face.

Cliff: No FBI knocks this time,

Kyle: that’s I, yeah, I’m not trying to get swatted over a thing that I believe and will not be swayed from. Counting or not counting gang violence, um To take it even further into heavy territory, Cliff, as an illustration of what you’ve just said, you know, one of the striking things about this awful Cornell Seven/57 business is one of the first things that women started saying was, you know, if the shoe were on the other foot, if it were a blacked-out dude happened upon by a group of women, he would’ve been hydrated and moisturized and had a blanket on top of him and, he would’ve gotten home safely and been tucked in.

again, to be invited in by women is the ultimate sign of respect in ours or any culture, and I just– I honestly don’t know how to coexist with anyone that feels otherwise than that. men, especially in the Western world, have created plenty of space for just yourself. Everything in the world is a big old boy circle jerk.

Now you, you and Pat McAfee and Theo Von can go f**k off to the ends of the earth and have each other. This– There’s so much in the beauty of this record that’s also a reminder that men don’t men do not, in fact, do things to be attracted by women. They do things for the gaze of other men So maybe that’s the most pointed, here’s a dick shape Rorschach for you If you’re offended by any of this discourse, then you’re probably a dude who wants other dudes to love you, and you need to go work that out on your own time and not take it out on women.

Cliff: there’s anything

wrong

Kyle: with that.

I was in the pool

Cliff: But yes, yes, if you are a man who truly wants to love women and something here confuses you, it is a good thing to sit with it. There’s a lot of good basic guidance here for you, unironically. We’ll get to some of it. One thing I do wanna touch before we leave, “Man, I Feel Like a Woman,” because I do, is if you need a specific, specific, specific instance of what I was talking about with the production gems and some of the reward you get from digging.

Okay, I’ll give you a literal moment in the song to appreciate. So I was mentioning earlier this is the song where on the chorus like actually a mental exercise if you’re listening to this podcast now. Just like conceptualize the chorus of “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” Play it in your head. Okay. Now the next chance you get, get stereo headphones, listen closely, and check out what’s happening on the chorus. There’s, on your left, as if sitting on a stool where Jerry Garcia would sit in a room somehow not just stage left but like in the back to the left somehow, is a guitar that’s… I- it’s got this almost T-Bone Burnett sort of, it’s not real distorted or heavy. It’s quiet. It’s ZZ Top-y but even softer than that, and you can really make out the twang and the reverb of the amp.

And so you can hear it over there on the left side and it’s doing really, really tasteful guitar work that doesn’t sound like it belongs in this really loud chorus. On the right side is this drone rotary of a synth or, or may- at times it almost feels like a rotary of fiddles or something, and it’s coming at the right.

And then there’s a slide guitar that just sort of enters in on occasion and then leaves. If you catch all of this stuff, then go back and listen to In the moment where you can catch that guitarist on the far left-hand side, he’ll hit this open guitar string at the exact moment that she says style.

And like, all of a sudden the guitar work will like jump up to your brain and you’ll like hear it consciously in a cool new way where you can track it. But like, to me, that is one of a thousand examples here where And I’m guessing a little bit for sure, right? But that’s, that doesn’t feel like something that got written.

That sounds like something that happened because they played it over and over and over and then went, “Whoa, hold on. There’s something about that.” The way that that hits, but only on that one line when it comes through. that’s one piece of the types of things that you can discover that like I never would’ve heard this on a, a loudspeaker out somewhere, in a car even, right?

That’s not the kind of nuance you can really pick up there. But it’s, it’s buried in the production that stacks up into the big sound that you hear and that you get familiar with

Kyle: I’m glad you pointed it out. The rotary thing specifically I wanna click in on because That was the first thing that I noticed on headphones is like, “Whoa, holy s**t. I’ve never noticed that before.” Like, there– A long time ago, there was a piano part in a Skynyrd song that I had never noticed before and had been listening to the song my literal whole life. And so getting caught by surprise in a song that seems as familiar as air is a delightful feeling in music because it seems like an impossibility, you know?

But it reminds you that in life you can always learn more things about the things you know. it seemed like to me on the first listen, like it was just the unison fiddles or the layering of fiddles that they were cutting back and forth on the stereo channels. But then I learned the thing about there being four players in– started envisioning it, to your point about people sitting in the chairs, I started envisioning it as the four players each playing on different beats in the measure and it– the rotary feeling coming from them sort of playing in a round robin fashion on the chorus.

I know the part in total was designed to feel like house music synth, right? That’s what it’s going for. It feel– In passing it feels like synth, and it really hits perfectly. It’s such a, such an in the weeds example of the crossover brilliance, of like in every way threading the needle on the sound.

The fiddles are either extolled or they get a lot of flack for being almost like a virtue signal in this record, but they’re used really brilliantly in this chorus. I would sit and listen to a three-hour Red Bull fireside chat about every detail of this record. I, I would go to a whole day of school just to talk about this album and every, every little thing the way that it happened. I hear a record like this and I can understand how people are so obnoxious about the 37 takes of a Beatles song, where he plays the fourth and not the fifth on version 72, you know, or God forbid, uh, every version of “Dark Star” The Dead ever did.

Well, he did this in minute 17 versus this, and he was in the feel. it’s so tasteful here. I don’t I don’t know. I don’t wanna apply a value judgment to it. I just wanna say it personally appeals to me the way the craft comes across in this record as exemplified by this song.

Cliff: I’m glad you went ahead and floated the idea that this is maybe a runaway great song of ever because we will not have to spend as much time on every song as we already did on this. but I’m holding back as it is, okay? I found one example to exemplify the idea. There’s a lot of depth here.

This is

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. First song on the record just could not open more iconically. there’s a lot of great side one track ones in the albums that we’ve covered, but man, this is up there with all of them.

Cliff: Comes out swinging for

Kyle: Comes out swinging.

Cliff: The next one, ” Holding On to Love,” is the beginning– was the beginning of my re-recognition, “Oh, I’m going to be singing all of these songs now in my life.” I’m just out in my life like, “I’m holding on,” all the time. I’m f**king lumineersing around singing Shania Twain in my backyard, uh, without a thought. And it reminded me of this record hit at some of the earliest points where I could commit songs to memory.

Kyle: Oh yeah

Cliff: And like I– maybe that’s pretty obvious from what we mentioned or whatever, but like, man, these were… It really has the feeling of like these were some of the first songs I ever knew top to bottom from just hearing them over and over again. And so singing back comes very naturally ’cause that was, we were certainly not a theater household, but we were a singing household for sure.

Everybody sang all the time, anything that was on their mind, and this was one of them for me, and I love it. It’s back in there again, and it also has a nice extreme ’90s reference that I enjoy that is at this point feels completely lost to time in Dr. Ruth

and the way that one, one of the pop culture references in this album end up, ends up being spot on for a very long time, and then one of them like here is oh, yeah, there was…

Let, let me tell you about TV. Um, let me tell you about some things that were happening when I was a kid, uh, before we found new ways to connect one another and ruin everything by putting the earth on the fast track to destruction. Before then, we had Dr. Ruth, who would sit in front of a microphone, not dissimilarly from how I am, looking right into the camera, um, holding something up that I wasn’t allowed to know existed and telling me how to get the most out of it. Good stuff.

Kyle: Very way to keep it G-rated

Cliff: I experienced it as G-rated. It was filtered through my silly brain who didn’t know anything, so that’s how it comes back out now for sure.

Kyle: this song was the first One that really tripped me out and alerted me to there being more than meets the eye in terms of complexity. I couldn’t catch the timing of the chorus. Like, if I had to sing it I couldn’t hit the rhythm for, like, a hot minute, and

Cliff: Whitney Houston drum challenge on Shania Twain’s.

Kyle: dude. 100%. It just, I labeled it as proggy, and I just keep thinking of this song as proggy, and it’s the first thing that made me start thinking about the hair metal or, professional grade aspects of this record.

because even though the A side is a lot like Brooks & Dunn, it’s a run of, it’s three pitches that are 90s country fastballs, 98, 97, 103. it’s got flourishes where you’re like, yeah, you, I mean, you can know every word, but you’re still gonna miss it. You’re gonna be early or late on it for a bit until you really get it internalized

Cliff: So is the next track, “Love Gets Me Every Time,” also one of the fastballs you would consider?

Kyle: Yeah, and it was the first single that she, she or the label released and said something specifically to that effect of like, ” Hey, here’s a nice romantic country song.” You know, this feels like what people are going to expect. but it’s got, again, it’s got a lot of touches underneath the surface. By the way, in “Holding On To Love,” there’s a great Tele solo.

I think it’s a– I assume it’s a Tele in that, but it’s very floaty. There’s almost an, a Mark Knopfler tone in that, and I made a note like, “Oh, I bet Tele player Cliff likes that

Cliff: I remember mentions of a Strat. I wonder if there was a Tele involved, ’cause I know– So Dan Huff played a, a modded ’64 Strat

Kyle: Hmm

Cliff: some other very odd stuff, uh, including an electric sitar and talk box I don’t know. Either way, they… Yeah, if you would like to go back to the extraordinarily nuanced discussion about the differences between guitars, this is a good example of that type of thing where the type of guitar, whether it is Stratocaster or Telecaster or whatever, these are people who understand how to make both of those guitars sound more like one another and used a whole bunch of amps and all the rest at their disposal to add that layering.

I can even more, to me at least, even more than the guitars, I can hear the amps on this one. The each, each one is like a, all right, we got this one’s like boutique tube eight watt over here, this thing extra like this, and it never sounds that way again. You can tell the gear lovers were involved in this even before we certainly validated that through text.

Kyle: I wish I knew enough to be able to suss out that level of detail, but there is an intangible quality that I, I know when it’s something that real ones will know, and it’s good to feel validated by you saying that just now. What do you l- what do you notice and/or like in “Love Gets Me Every Time”?

Cliff: I, I have a bit of a funny time with this song, if for no other reason than like this was also my first like sincere life encounter with I remember asking, I don’t know if it was my parents or somebody, it was like, “So, gall darn. So gal…” Okay.

So I’m…

Kyle: Not allowed? Yeah.

Cliff: Well, but like,

Kyle: basket counts?

Cliff: so I’ve, I’ve seen, I’ve heard this usually from like the old prospector in the Wild West movies. So, um, one, what’s this? Two, I just learned that she’s Canadian. Can you tell me more about country people who live in Canada, and do they say gall darn a lot more than I’m used to?

And then like that little moment in time as, you know, a probably a 12 or whatever year old I love just like drawing the dotted line between that one and then discovering Letterkenny and going, “Oh. Oh. There’s a, there’s a whole people I had not conceptualized who exist,

Kyle: You saw your sweetie the other day

Cliff: Whi- which I kinda laughed at myself about, just in terms of, uh, okay, well now I’m just, yes, we’re painting with broad brushes and I’m laughing and, you know, “Letterkenny makes fun of a certain type of person anyway,” and now I’m just laughing about the concept of Canadian hicks, and maybe this doesn’t exist anyway.

And then I would go to find out,

Kyle: Brother, Hicks and Skids and whatever are as Fayetteville, Georgia as they are rural Ontario

Cliff: yes, and to really drive that home, one of my favorite discoveries in a direct quote was eventually you know, scroll all the way down to “From This Moment On,” the Celine Dion ass song that actually kicks. Shania Twain said a quote about the song. Quote, “I was a bit bored with the pace of soccer compared with the lively games of ice hockey that I was more accustomed to, and it started flowing out.

This is one of my favorite original songs.” She literally went to a soccer game and got bored from watching hockey normally, so she decided to write, oh, another one of the greatest songs of all time. It’s like all right. All right, this person exists.

Kyle: At a soccer game with– At a soccer game in Italy, no less, with her husband who loves and is enraptured with soccer, and she got so bored that she couldn’t talk to him, that she came up with a whole world in her head.

Cliff: Incredible

Kyle: Didn’t intend to write a… It is a Celine Dion-ass song though, because she said, “I’ll put it in my publishing bank.

I will give it to Celine Dion specifically.” Uh, and then her husband was like, “No, you should do it, and you should do it as a duet with this other guy who writes songs for first dances at weddings who I have produced.” His name’s Bryan Adams

Cliff: Not to be confused with Ryan Adams, as I did in the very early days of trying to download music and getting one letter wrong and having disastrous consequences

Kyle: Another great guy relegated to a key card at the Neutral Milk Hotel That’s Ryan Adams, not Bryan Adams. For sad boys who still think in, amidst all that sadness, they’re entitled to something anything but a good song from Ryan Adams

Cliff: We skipped over in, in that moment on to the next track and left behind track four, “Don’t Be Stupid.”

Kyle: Wait, I always have one more thing to say about the song before we move on to the next song. It won’t be for, it won’t be for, uh, it won’t be for all the songs. But there are a couple of details that really satisfied me in “Love Gets Me Every Time,” which by the way, didn’t, did not really know that “Love Gets Me Every Time” was the name of the song.

I had mentally slotted it as a radio hit called “Gone and Done It,” and honestly had forgotten that it was a Shania Twain song. But the Galder and “Gone and Done It” has been a vocal stem for me for, 30 years now. so it was nice to file that in the memory palace, uh, in the worlds upon worlds in my VR brain in the right place finally.

Cliff: It was supposed to be named Galdar and gone and done it, and they decided that’s a bit of a tongue twister and changed It think that’s a good call

Kyle: hard to say. Just like the name of this record was supposed to be “No Inhibitions,” which would not have hit the same as “Come On Over.” So just good decisions all around. Every time there was a choice to be made, they made the gooder one.

You know, I really like this song because one of my favorite songs is “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” by Elvin Bishop, and this is the same sentiment as that.

And I always like the what’s your version of the same basic idea of a human experience. this is “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” but falling in love multiple times instead of one time, which I think is great, especially for the woman to have that version of the song instead of the man. I love the lyric, “My heart changed my mind.”

It’s a very simple, economical way to express a beautiful thing that I wish people would be honest with themselves about more often. And having a very simple vocabulary to express a thing that happens can often help it happen more honestly. So if you’re out there and you’re listening, let your heart change your mind more often and let others do the same.

Musically, there’s great steel guitar. We talked multiple times at length about love of steel guitar. Great all over this record. Legendary steel guitar players on this thing. And there’s a great, what I’ve always called the startup country lick, like starting up a car, like . Uh, kind of a surfy thing, and that startup lick alternates with fiddle in really nice ways in the breaks.

But the star of this song for me is the vocal harmonies. And to your point, Cliff, this is the great example of it’s not overpowering in the mix. The two places, or I guess the two aspects of the same thing I would say are under the “love gets me every time,” maybe it’s the chorus, maybe it’s the pre-chorus.

There’s a lot of like A section, B section, I don’t really know what to call this. This moves into this thing really fluidly and, they don’t necessarily always do four bars or eight bars of the same thing. So that contributes almost to the progginess. This is not a jazzy record in any way, but they chop stuff up really nicely.

There’s a sliding vocal harmony under “love gets me every time” that bends between notes really elegantly. And to almost have it be a throwaway, ’cause you can’t really super hear it unless you’re listening hard, you know, a gentleman is someone who can plays the, play the accordion but doesn’t.

It’s one of those things. And I love the move of the harmony and all of it builds to ” done it.” Everything cuts out and it goes, “done it,” and it cuts, and then it turns back around to the next rev of it. But it, it builds to nothing, and it’s the like Wile E. Coyote out over the canyon, still in the air until he realizes there’s nothing below him, and then he falls down.

It’s got that sort of sensation, you know, going over the end of the line on the typewriter. that was a thing that when I noticed it, it was like, “Oh, that’s not… That wouldn’t be your first choice as a songwriter.” That’s a thing you would have to deliberately locate. “Oh, how do we add a little spice in the writer’s room?”

and maybe that’s obvious if you’re like in music all the time, but to me it’s just a reminder as somebody who doesn’t write songs to not reach for the first choice.

Cliff: That reminds me of one specific choice. We’re jumping around a little bit, but on From this moment on, one of the things I noticed that also felt like a choice and I’m gonna, I guess, tickle the fringes of conjecture here, but I think you’ll know where I’m going. as they sing that song, which like even in the 90s, right? Like the y- you’re selling a song that then other people go and sing because there were more opportunities to dance and sing to things in public than there used to be.

It’s really hard to explain, but like if a big song was big and it was cool to sing, like it’d be like the equivalent of like, ” I heard a Teddy Swim song the other day and now I get to go sing it somewhere.” Like you, y- you sort of used to get to do that because there used to be third spaces or whatever.

But nevertheless, like this is a, pretty straightforwardly delivered pop song and one of the things that stuck out to me now going all the way back is in singing all the way through that chorus, there’s actually a clear moment where they take a breath

Kyle: Hmm.

Cliff: like towards the end of the stanza, and it struck me.

It like, it was s- really surprising and I was like, “Why does that feel odd?” ‘Cause we produce over those now. we don’t do that anymore. If you have to take a breath to complete the line, we simply produce it differently then teach you to sing it differently live to minimize it, whereas like both…

You can hear both of them fully stop and take a full breath before continuing on with another line when it would’ve otherwise been a seamless production choice to just make them line into line into line, introducing a really subtle sense of realism about like breath, lung capacity, what two people can say to one another.

Like not to overthink it, but what a particular little choice that stood out to me that I don’t feel like would survive very much today.

Kyle: Yeah. there’s also they break up a two-syllable word over a bar and it’s like an S sound in the middle or something, and they break it up in a non-natural way,

But it works. And it’s clear that it was a choice because the two people sing it in the same non-natural way. And I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

But to your point, it’s– it made it feel more real. And I was like, “Oh, I appreciate that.”

Cliff: Yeah. J- to be specific about it so that we can put the example in it’s the line, “My dreams came true because of you.” And they do, “My dreams came true because…” Otherwise you would’ve just gone straight through

Kyle: Okay, but it’s also the because. It’s because

Cliff: Yes.

Yes.

Kyle: the S on that.

Cliff: Yeah. And like, I’m left to guess, did, did they do this because it sounded better?

Did they do this because it actually teaches other people how to sing it? did they do it because it, it, to your point, drew out these couple of moments where actually they’re not perfectly in sync and it gives a feeling of realness to the duet that wouldn’t exist otherwise? I don’t know, and I don’t have to over-index on it.

But again, lots of little moments like this peppered throughout where it feels like something was meant by it, and it at least can capture your attention and appreciation hidden deep in this pop song you probably wrote off a long time

Kyle: There’s so much lore in this song too. The first choice for the duet was Elton John, but, she loves Brian White and said, you know, he’s an excellent singer. He’s the best male voice in country music and beyond. he described the song as extremely challenging vocally. But then the thing that was interesting to me was initial first run pressings of the international version, featured White on the song, while subsequent pressings began featuring the song as a solo recording, which is what you’ll see in the music video.

It’s a solo of Shania. And then in early 1998, Mercury executives were informed that White would be unable to promote the song alongside Twain. Therefore, Twain had to return to the studio to re-record White’s parts on her own. And according to White’s spokesman at Asylum Records, “We’ve certainly heard knocking on our door about this song being too contemporary for Brian’s sake.

Therefore, it’s fine if they wanna go to the Top 40 without him.” White later claimed that he had no hard feelings toward Twain for him being excluded from the international version of the song, stating, “They’re releasing the song as a pop record, and I’m not a pop artist, so my feelings aren’t hurt.” Just a very interesting, like, music business-y aspect of it.

But here on the North American version of the record, you have this great, duet where their voices work really nicely together. And immediately you think of first dance at a wedding. It’s– There’s- Yeah. That

Cliff: That’s the other selling point of Music Add this time. Yes. Forgot to mention

Kyle: The other part of the lore was she recorded never released versions with a Brazilian duo that I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce out of respect, I promise, and with an Irish singer named Ronan Keating. So there was a like, everybody falls in love in every culture, and this can be the song for all of them.

I just wanna say about this one, I swore I hated this type of song, and I don’t think there are many contexts where you’ll be catching me like riding down the road or like putting this on a playlist or whatever It’s so schmaltzy and it like

Cliff: The intro is brutal, dude.

Kyle: it clashed with so many things I think I love about music Maybe I’m just getting old.

It’s often my old age. There is something to be said for the big love ballad, th- this form that peaked in the 90s. there’s a part of me that would give anything to look out upon culture and see this level of yearning and vulnerability now. I yet again, I feel like I could write a whole Substack essay about the convergence of geopolitical and socioeconomic conditions that had to exist as a precursor to a song like this being not only possible, but commercially viable.

You know? It just seems so alien to the world we live in now for somebody to take an enormous swing emotionally and sonically like this. You know? It would seem insincere, but at the time, this was the most since– It was just an amplification of the most sincere thing in the world. I can’t think of a more earnest song than this.

You know what I mean?

Cliff: Especially not from women. And I think that that is ano- the– It’s not the angle or the only angle, but it’s another thing that draws it out, ’cause what comes to mind in terms of sincerity, if I think about it, is a bunch of country songs by dudes.

I Swear” by John Michael Montgomery, right? Ok- uh, I– that one’s a good one.

I,

Kyle: That, uh, l- yeah, and slash all for one.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: But that’s peppered all over the landscape of writings about this is, who does authentic– When we say authentic, first of all, why does that get applied to country and hip hop more than any other forms of musical expression? We know why they’re identity-based.

And why does authenticity get levied as a compliment or a critique

to certain types of people and not others? And the s- the subsequent question to all of that should be, who the f**k cares? Is the song good? Are you having a good time, right? And does it make you feel good in a blind taste test?

Cliff: Cliff is on record as yes, as soon as the song starts. Before that point, when we’re doing the

all I can- you, wanna talk about choices. The going in and out of melody versus talking, that doesn’t make sense to me. That’s d- I would’ve, uh… That’s not quite my tempo. I would’ve advised something different

yes, and now we have the benefit of hindsight. Listen, Shania, you taught too many people that they could paper over their songs this way. So now we got a bunch of country pop crossover people go, “” except on top of beats now. And d- do you know that song? No, I don’t know that song. That is of a person murmuring over a beat.

I don’t listen to a lot of stuff like that, and if I do, it’s gonna be “Me Without You,” thank you

Kyle: By the way, you have to have an enormous amount of personality, charisma to pull off talking in songs.

May she rest in peace, th- the Dolly Parton move. That’s the Dolly Parton signa- I mean, it’s an old world entertainer thing, right? When you’re doing live review and you gotta vamp. Lots of people have done it, but it’s most recognizable in this form of great country entertainer, country pop entertainer as like Dolly Parton did it as well as anyone who’s ever lived has done it.

Shania’s so good at it. She makes it look so effortless, and I think a lot of people do that move, and that’s like scripted freestyle. It’s just like we can tell the difference

Cliff: So no thank you. Hard pass on “Whisper Talk.” To Cliff and Kyle, please move into the songs that made me cry. Thank you. Now, we You just leave that part, leave that part on low volume for a second until the piano really gets going, and then

Kyle: you can crank it See, it’s just not for me,

Cliff: see the problem though is that if you try to turn it down, someone walks into the room like, “Are you ASMR-ing in public right now?” no, I just don’t like the first 40 seconds of this song.”

Kyle: Well, at least there’s the easy and highly defensible like, “No, no, no, it’s just Shania Twain,” and you turn it back up and they’re like, “Oh, that’s cool.”

Cliff: yeah, that, I, yeah, that probably would work actually with most people So we’ve loved several songs here already. We’re not on pace to be able to hit every one of them in the way that we can. Would you like to touch on some specific ones from here? Would you like me to pick out a couple of moments of things that I noticed or wanted to mention?

What’s what’s definitely gotta get out of your brain as we start to round corners?

Kyle: I’d like to talk about the title track just for a second.

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: I’d like to say a thing or two about “When” And I think spiritually we need to address “Whatever You Do, Don’t” and “If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask.” I don’t know that we need to get into the musically necessarily. We gotta talk about that “Don’t Impress Me Much.”

Cliff: All right, let me ramp you into the title track really fast. I’ll just mention a couple of things. W- we, we glossed over quickly, “Don’t Be Stupid” a little bit, but fiddle stuff is awesome on that song. It’s got this sorta almost Celtic influence to it and energy which also just, repeatedly slams my brain into the 90s, which include things like, oh, for a minute there Riverdance was a thing, and we were all very curious

about Irish line dancing

Kyle: did you watch the music video to this song?

Cliff: No.

Kyle: Because they literally do

Cliff: Oh, no. All right, and there’s another moment of you’ll have to believe me that that’s how it really happened. Yeah. No, I didn’t watch the video. Incredible stuff

Kyle: Yeah, so many of these songs have videos. And just like the songs themselves, n-n-not all of them are the best thing that you’ve ever seen, but they’re all something

Cliff: Videos are hard. I get it. Um, by the time we get to the title track, though, the main thing I wrote down was just accordion in all capital letters. Just like at this point, once again, they’re showing off already. Feels outrageous to me that these are the types of things that are making up the songs, but they’re just…

it’s becoming less of a surprise at this point, and I’m just writing down like, “Here’s the cool thing that I, an idiot, noticed about what happened in this song.”

Kyle: I– the main thing that was palpable for me is the vibe shift from dancing, slow dancing at your wedding very romantically and then departing for a honeymoon in zydeco Margaritaville. and this is one of yet another example where she opens with a pit call and she says, “Shake it” on this one.

Like there, there almost needs to be, for all the great capitalism that they did around this record, they missed an opportunity to have a Shania Twain Woody doll that did all of the different pit calls. “Cool. Shake it. One, two, now.”

Cliff: Bop It

Kyle: that’s right I just wanna say that ” Come on over, come on in” is I think my favorite chorus on the record somehow. It’s certainly the stickiest for me for some reason, and there’s something about the don’t worry, be happy ass easy breeziness of it that’s such a good middle of the record thing. And it’s

is not intuitive to me that this is the title track of the record because it is a g- I mean, it’s a great solid hit, but it’s, pure sugar compared to some of the other stuff. I do love the lyrics. I’d be curious for how you feel about the lyrics that are kind of nothing, like, “Get a life, get a grip, get away somewhere, take a trip.”

If you tried to write lyrics that are that nothing, they would not be that nothing, There, there’s a, there’s a don’t try to surf just surfness to the lyrics

Cliff: I f- there is an early feeling and sensation of some Claude ass writing though in here. It’s just like, “Hey, AI, can you help me relax? Get a life, get a grip, get

Kyle: ChatGPT, where are my glasses?

Cliff: Be a winner, be a star. Yeah, be happy who you are. Yeah.

Kyle: I feel you

Cliff: My honest take for sure though is I can’t have what I want lyrically on all these songs. I get them on most of it. I’m happy. I’m good to go. This is fun enough

Kyle: But to have, ” Black Eyes, Blue Tears” and this just a couple songs away from each other is– That’s a hard needle to thread, and it makes total sense. Like, I don’t question it at all. And they don’t even really feel like that much of a vibe shift, which feels crazy to say, but you just are along for the ride with all of it.

There, there’s just a few clicks over, you know, their neighbor houses on the same street. the title track is also another instance where there is spiritual kinship with existing songs out there. I thought about Mungo Jerry’s “Summertime,” dun da dun dun da dun, and the whoa-ohs in the song, which always an interesting choice to just leave the, leave this– I don’t wanna put a lyric here, just leave it as a scratch vocal thing, you know, just do the doo-wop here.

the melody line of the whoa-ohs reminded me of “Little Bitty Pretty One.” so again, more of that like Motown doo-wop stuff in there over the zydeco accordion. a tasteful combination of elements that’s just like a Pretzel bites at the mall type moment, and then you move on to win

Cliff: Which all I’ll say about Wynn is speaking of Dolly, which we’ll probably mention a couple of times before we close out because it is the cited and sourced influence of this human being and this record for absolute certain, yes. But similar to the Dolly episode when, uh, I unveiled to you, Kyle, in vulnerability that I am now a person who sings “Highlight of My Life” every day each morning.

Wynn turned into the, oh no, I’m singing “When Money Goes On Trees and People Live in Peace” a lot now to myself as I go about my day. and I enjoyed singing Dolly’s more, finding myself singing Dolly’s more, but this one did the same to me. Anyway, the good part is I never memorized the really wordy verses, so it just mumbles through and then I pick up the chorus.

Kyle: We need a DJ blend of “When Money Grows on Trees” with Kendrick’s “Money Trees,” since that’s a thing people are doing

Cliff: As long as we can keep the guitar solo, which also has no business doing what it does

Kyle: Okay, I wanted to ask you about this. I swear to God, is that tapping? Is he tapping?

Cliff: I’m not sure. Maybe.

It’s

Kyle: it’s very metally

Cliff: incredibly active guitar solo.

Yeah

Kyle: Yeah, yeah. There’s a tasteful, like, eight bar or 12 bar thing after the first verse, and then after the second verse he goes longer and he goes hard with the– I think it’s, it feels like tapping to me. If it’s not spiritually, it’s tapping. The two other things that I wanted to say about “When” are

I had the thought of like– I, I kept thinking about who’s picking up the mantle for this now, and, and while I really don’t think there is a modern equivalent just because of how culture has cha- monoculture has changed, I did think if you delivered this song with a little bit more, let’s say, uptown disaffection, it could be Charli XCX on “Music, Fashion, Film”.

Cliff: I, yeah.

Kyle: It could be “Yeah”. I thought of the song “Yeah” from “Music, Fashion, Film”, and how I’d love to see what the intersection of those two even looked like. There’s a very like Sugar and Spice from, from “Batman Forever” to they’re about like one’s trying to be joyful and one is very cynical, but they both want people to love and be free and express themselves, and there’s similar thesis statements, I think, said coming from opposite directions with those two.

So, I say that to say that makes me feel even more strongly about the artiness of this record, which is something that I don’t think it gets enough credit for being. But then the main thing in “When” is the first few times I listened to it, the way she so slowly said, “One, wait, wait, two, wait, wait, now” pissed me off at first.

Like, no, no, no, just say it at the right timing so we can get into it. But then I, I came to feel like it was really important because it mentally set you at one pace, for the vocals to go much more slowly than the rhythm of the song, and that tension is what drives the song. And that, again, smart, professional.

De- it, professional because it’s deliberate, and it especially is accentuated when the whole thing tumbles and collapses suddenly at the end into the little drum fill and just the “yeah”. And the “yeah” at– The little quick turn yeah at the end is what made me really feel the Charli XCX of it all. But there’s such a steady tension of the two rhythmic speeds between the vocals and the instruments on that, that it was like, oh, this, there’s more going on here than you would get on the surface listen.

Cliff: I would be fascinated to hear this song translated directly into a minor key

Kyle: Hmm. Which then brings up my one question about the next song, “Whatever You Do, Don’t,” um, which opens with, “Here we go,” said in a dot dot dot fashion. Is that in a minor key? Is– Or the verse

If it’s not, and I’d never be able to pick that out for sure, maybe that’s for you to go off and figure It feels like what I as a non-musician would identify as being in a minor key. It’s got a, what I would call a minor key feel because it feel, it felt in the verses specifically like spooky, almost haunted house-y

Cliff: So yeah. So they’re… This is one of many songs that probably doesn’t have a straightaway major or minor because what they’re doing is hitting major tonality on the chorus and the verses are accenting minor and to the, to the degree that it’s playing it like the bass note, like it’s in a minor key. So you’re actually feeling the back and forth shift between them picking the sixth and the first as the main note that they’re picking, like that they’re hammering on.

you know, at the end of the day, there’s really no mathematical way to determine a key. It’s really just like we think they hit this note the most and so they’re flip-flopping between the two a bit here.

Kyle: But it reminded me of all the way back to “Portishead” when you pointed out that I think “Wandering Star” is the one song in a major key on that record, and as such has a different fee- is s- it is a palate cleanser type thing in the middle of the record. And with the s- the lyrical subject matter, it’s just interesting.

It, it just gives it more, more of a bouquet of flavors. The sort of tonal complexity mixing with the tension of whatever you do, don’t do these things. I thought that was a really tasteful pairing where the key action mixes with the tension, the s- the sort of cleverness and subversion of the lyrics

Cliff: I feel that I owe it, in a sense, to anyone listening who is of good heart and good cheer and good brain and good person on inside. If you wanna touch her ask, it’s filled with good information for you to take into account. I’m not being silly. I’m like staring straight into the audio camera at some of you, talking to you as somebody who has had a lot of love in his life, who has spent a lot of time with somebody who is not afraid to be herself, to be loud and take up space in a way that I love.

Like, there, there is a lot to the concept of if you can get past your initial defenses of these phrases about “Oh, look at all these rules and stipulations about me being able to, show and express my love with somebody else,” and instead you hone in on the first words of the song, “Let me let you in on a secret.”

Me and Kyle have been talking about these. In here is good stuff for you to internalize. If you wanna get to know her and get inside her mind and move in closer, take it slow. All this sounds stupid until it’s like, no, I’m looking at you through the camera and telling you this is extraordinarily detailed, helpful, step-by-step instruction advice.

If you find

Kyle: The manosphere hates this

Cliff: like I- Yeah. The, yeah, because the two requests are slow down and ask questions.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: everyone’s so f**king wound up these days, man. If you can do those two things, you can open yourself up to the world of feminine energy that is incredible. Like, we’re not being coy and silly here. Like, there’s like a whole world that we don’t have inside of us as men, and we can interact with that.

And yes, it goes the other way, but that’s not what we’re talking about right now. And if you’ll sit and do two things, if you’ll slow down, which includes listening, right? Slow down, take your time, listen, and then ask. Yes, it’s about consent. It’s also just about asking questions. It’s about understanding that you need to check in with somebody about your relationship to them, because I don’t know if you’ve met another human before, sometimes our feelings change day to day.

It’s important that you touch base with someone who might have changing feelings to check in and make sure you’re connected to them

and to…

Kyle: before you touch

bodies

Cliff: so ends the podcast within a podcast of like sincere advice for you if you wanna actually get out of the hole that you keep complaining about living in. For the rest of you, you can set up shop there and move on. We are giving you gold, uh, and you can take it or not. We do not often say, “Hey, look at this pop song.

It has very important things for you to consider in your life.” I’m telling you straight up, yep, this one does. It’s good stuff to internalize. It’s a good way to test your responses and think about the way you’re interacting with people. and it’s just especially helpful despite having some old-fashioned thinking involved in it

Kyle: In the spirit of Shania, I wanna emphasize your point that what we’re saying is like, it’s not hard. It’s not a 37-page West Coast playbook. It’s, this is the run game, man. Just show up, get three plays every down. It’s so easy because it’s so obvious, and it makes it delightful because you don’t have to think about it.

You just do the good thing. just do the good thing. It’s actually not… The great secret is that there’s no secret. Just be good. Just slow down and listen. And w- and then what a delight that is, ’cause it takes so much guesswork out of your whole life to just do the obvious thing. You know? the best explanation is usually the simplest. That is the secret to love. It is quite obvious. One of my favorite tweets of all time, the first thing favorited in my camera roll is a screenshot from 2015 of a tweet by @internetluke. “Me: I am chill. Chill dude: No, you’re not. Me: Motherf**king yes, I am.

Chill dude: Chill dude, see? Me: I have a lot to learn.” This song is that tweet.

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: a lot to learn.” Motherf**king am not. You am not

Cliff: Yep. And I will not take the easy armchair swipe at online dating makes everyone expect to connect immediately now, and on the– Whatever, maybe dude. But just like real deep connection takes time, no matter what. Even if you connect with somebody very quickly, which like, I don’t know, I did. I, I had a very long-term relationship, but we also connected very quickly once we d- considered that context.

Nevertheless, it has been a story of taking it slow, asking questions, asking for permission in important ways, because like you’re an important person in a relationship. You take on responsibility. You need permission in the sense of you need to connect with another human being in the way that they want you to.

Like this is the way that it works. To the degree that I would say not only nerds is this good advice, but if you wanna ever feel the way that you’re gonna feel in “Still the One” on the next song, you’re gonna have to do the s**t we just talked about in this one. That’s how you get to the other one

Kyle: you fail a lot and you frustrate. A, a, a lot of it is failure and frustration. But as my old friend Ernie Johnson says, there are two types of jobs in this world: got-to jobs and get-to jobs. A job that you say, “I’ve got to do this,” versus a job that you say, “I get to do this.” And honestly, bro, it all starts with mindset.

Getting up and having a frustrating day with somebody who loves you and makes the choice to be with you is a get-to job. Like, oh man, I get to do this. it’s gonna suck a little, but I still get to do this job. A bad day fishing, you know what I mean? So Ro- real Rorschach. Do you got to do this job or do you get to do this job?

Cliff: Yep And so therefore, I am a person who listens to “You’re Still the One” and gets uniquely and hilariously emotionally involved in it. And we would come to learn eventually that this maybe ironically in the long view of history was about her and her relationship to Mutt because it turned out that he was not the one eventually.

And they did some very funny shuffling

Kyle: If you held your money in Kalshi long enough, you would’ve gotten a payout. Just take the over

Cliff: Will Shania Twain marry the ex-husband of the person that cheated on her with her ex-husband and married him instead? Just what? Okay, bro.

Kyle: Another i- another way that she was extremely of the pop culture of the time, she did Wife Swap

Cliff: And that doesn’t diminish the sadness of what may have happened there, but it also doesn’t change the hilarity of the outcome as written in words when you look back on it. But aside from that, and in

Kyle: With two Swiss people.

Cliff: no idea, no clue

Kyle: What is anything,

Cliff: I I don’t know. I don’t know, but I, as a person who was in a relationship that was verbally doubted by people who should’ve otherwise been supporting me or at least energetically offering helpful feedback, this has a real f**k you energy to me that I really, really, really enjoy and that a- is, like, actually meaningful to me.

I identify a lot with this as a person who’s been with somebody for practically my entire adult life at this point, and, uh, as should be assumed about anyone who’s been married this long, something we have chosen over and over again with each other, not simply something we have fallen into or feel that we are the victim of.

And in that sense, to be this old and this far into a relationship and to know that later on I’m gonna go interact with exactly the person I’m thinking of and I’ll have some of this energy in my heart, it’s gonna be hard enough not to even cry when I see that, man. So I love this song, and I can’t even, approach objectiveness in evaluating this one at all.

Kyle: I think the genius of Shania Twain is that spite toward others and gratitude toward herself and her partner exists in the writing of this song in equal measure, and neither of them overshadow the deep earnest of romantic love. I don’t understand much about time. You know, the more time I exist, the less grip I have on it.

But one thing I do appreciate about time is that it gives you gratitude. It– You have so much more capacity to be grateful for, like, first of all, how the hell am I even still here? Second of all, that I’ve shared, that I have a mirror of myself or some expanded understanding of myself by somebody who has been in time and space, a l- a lot of it with me. The more of that you get, the more you appreciate it and the more you want, and there’s no substitute for that feeling, and I think she captures the beauty of time with someone really, really beautifully. And, time, duration of time and age are hard to capture in music. So much of music and art is the, you know, the playground of the young, especially the way we’ve done popular music.

It’s been really the domain of, of young people and the now, and let me take a photograph of what life feels like right now in this moment. And to capture a lot of time in a photograph is so hard to do. It’s very different than the medium, th- than a medium like film, where a lot of time passes.

You know, if you have three or four minutes you can’t put a lot of time. Three or four minutes and no visuals ostensibly at first you can’t put a lot of time and space into it. So in that sense, I think a lot– I, I don’t wanna project anything on you, but I think of a lot of gratitude that we both feel for this song.

Appreciation and respect comes from the songcraft of Shania’s ability to distill so much feeling into a really small space.

Cliff: Yeah. And I’ll add that for me at least, I identify with how she describes time, and I wanna communicate to people that that is, that’s what it feels like. Like sh- when she says like, “Looks like we made it,” like that’s what it feels like.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: you don’t wake up every morning and have a sorta like chart that’s going up and to the right.

It’s, “Oh, s**t. Man, we’ve been doing this for a while. Man, we got through some s**t, huh?” And it just like hits you, and then you kinda move on with your day, and then it hits you, and then something else hits you. And then like you say, like if you allow yourself, those turn into just like, oh, every object in my, in the memory palace that is my real reality has turned into a story of gratitude about something that I got through with this person who lives with me.

Our house is a, a museum of trinkets that like hold these little times and moments and opportunities where we said, ” Well, this sucks. This is really hard,” or, “This is gonna be crazy,” or, “I don’t know what this is gonna be like,” or whatever. And y- you never get your bearings when it’s happening. It’s only afterwards and you go, “Oh, we, we made it through that, huh?” Not to be overly specific, but there is a real sense of like as you go along of just like you’re kinda sitting on the front porch of life going, “Oh man, remember that? Hmm.”

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: kind of like exchanging knowing glances with another person who remembers it, ’cause the ability for you to express what was happening in that moment is gone except for that person.

but it’s, only ever, “Looks like it, looks like we did it. Oh s**t, look at it.” It’s, it’s never while it’s happening. It, it’s so hard to sit on top of presence in the moment where the relationship feels right somehow, because as soon as you try to do it, you realize you’re, you’re hunting for a thing that doesn’t exist.

You’re trying to balance things in equilibrium that never settle that way.

Kyle: Yeah, you’re getting the old light of a star.

Cliff: Yes. You’re n- you’re never getting to a point and then trying to freeze yourself in it because now it’s right. It’s never that.

Kyle: Yeah. It reminds me of a brilliant thing that you said to me one time. I’ll never forget, we were at The Local. You had just turned 36, and you pointed out, the first 18 years of your life are somebody forming it for you to be a certain way. The next 18 years are you usually undoing all of that, re-reacting against that and forming your own version of yourself.

And then at 36, it’s the first time where you don’t have to react against anything. You have all the knowledge and experience of those first two phases, and you can choose whatever you want the next one to be. And that’s what is irrepla- that’s what’s truly priceless about going down the stretch with somebody.

You know, everybody can have different feelings about monogamy or different positions on relationships and whatever, but that’s the real value to me is just like, once you get through so many of the slings and arrows and you’ve seen all of somebody’s ugliness, and you’ve made the choice again and again, like, “Nah, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be worth it even if it kills me.”

And to your point, you make it through, it’s like, “Oh man, we can do anything,” uh, we’re, 40 and it’s only… I really feel like it’s only starting to get good. And when I look at a person like Shania, when I look at an artist like Shania, where there’s so much all over this album that’s like in love with love, I think it’s all about that. I think she has a really primal artist’s connection to what deep, true love feels like. And that’s one level of it, and then the fact that she’s able to distill it and express it in such clever, relatable ways.

You know, she uses humor as a great device all over this, and I remember specifically she said she wanted to write stuff in a way that a husband and wife could be listening to this in the car and look over at each other and laugh, but it would be a way to broach the subject matter no matter what their position on the thing was.

And your first reaction would be like, “Well, that’s a bit of a coexist sticker type thing.” But it’s like, I don’t– Man, the– We talked in the Gang of Four episode about small P politics. I think that’s what small P politics are. I think that’s what Mandani is out there doing. Everything truly is political because politics are the science of coexistence, and what higher form of coexistence is there than love?

Than two people choosing to be in intimate community with each other for every bit of their lives until they die. There’s so much that we can learn from love, and Shania obviously is like a PhD of understanding the form and the science of love. So, not to be a it really is that deep guy about it, but this whole, this whole f**king podcast is it really is that deep.

you’ve stumbled into the wrong saloon if you’re not one of those people. don’t take for granted how much there is to learn from what’s being expressed in these songs.

Cliff: Agreed, and without taking a bit of that away. On a slightly less serious note, there is a really awesome steel guitar solo on this record or on this song that like, the– they’re cutting off the sustain so quickly that it even reminds me of the slide guitar effect at the beginning of “Free Bird” where they’re trying to imitate an actual bird, where it’s like, I would guess here they’re trying to imitate a sense of, of longing or something like that with the notes, but it’s just, it’s another example of you didn’t have to do that, but you did. And I, I really love it. And early on when I was listening to it, I wrote, “Did Omar Rodriguez-Lopez play on this record?” Because that’s a bit of what it feels like in his older age, speaking of getting older. It feels like something he would do. But what a killer song.

Kyle: And it’s the first of another three-track sequence of, as Kendall Roy would say, all bangers all the time. You have a full-blown hair metal song with, patriarchal inversion in “Honey, I’m Home.” Very f- very funny. It reminded me of, Pour Some Sugar On Me” with a line dance chorus, or specifically one of my favorite hair metal attempts, Bad Company’s “Here Comes Trouble.” but in that song, there’s, in the chorus, a combination of really fluid-sounding, like liquidy-sounding guitar tone and really textural pedal steel that weave in and out of each other really nicely. Like we talked about the vocal harmony from earlier in the record, the string instruments do a version of that in the chorus on this song.

Cliff: Yeah, and she in a sense code switches in the song in the chorus, and it hits a stomp clap that’s not found anywhere else on the record but sounds a lot like male country artists from the time. And it would never have hit me then, but kinda hit me in retrospect like, “Oh, you don’t do this move on other songs.

You took o- like in flipping things, you actually found a musical move that you hadn’t used on a country record and it gets to play a character.”

Kyle: That’s so fun.

Cliff: That song is fun in general

Kyle: And then it goes into the funniest song on the record. Another song with a great iconic video where she stayed having that s**t on. The fit went crazy in the video. But, man, the po- the small p politics of this song are here too. You’ve got the moves, but do you have the touch? You’re a rocket scientist?

Cool. I don’t give a s**t. Can you be nice with me? Can you just be a person that I can talk to?

Cliff: Women want so much. a man and a person?

Kyle: I also would be remiss if I didn’t mention it spawned one of my favorite memes ever, which is the four-up based on the Natalie Portman “Star Wars,” meme format where it’s, Shania saying, “You’re Brad Pitt,” and Brad Pitt in the next frame saying, “That impress you much though, right?” And it’s Shania with no caption, and Brad again saying, “But wait, that impress you much though, right?” I love that and I love how the list of okay sos gets less and less demanding to your point about women ask for so much. You’re a rocket scientist, you’re Brad Pitt, you th- you’ve got a car, you literally have public transfer, you have your own transportation, or you think you’re Elvis I’ll take anything at this point, man.

Just be cool

Cliff: Yep, and the further she gets the furthest she gets into just… Well, verse three is she’s actually just making fun of you now. She’s, “Oh, you like your car, huh?” “You, uh, are looking for more time with women, but I noticed that you like that car a lot, and it’s pretty funny.”

Kyle: Once again, most of the time males are trying to impress other males

Cliff: Not that there’s anything wrong with that,

Kyle: I love that when I sent it to you, you said, “And in making this apparently impromptu reference, she has inadvertently made the greatest long-term point about men in the history of culture. Unprecedented levels of dart emoji.”

Cliff: Well, I mean, as the story goes, the response is, “Okay, so you’re Brad Pitt,” because recently at that moment, uh, some nude photos of him had leaked. We told you it was a different time before internet, everybody. Okay? So people thought they got blurry shots of Brad Pitt’s situation, and this is like a pull a rabbit out of a hat type pop culture reference that she makes here.

But yes, to the point like, oh, long term we went, oh, he continues to be a beautiful man who is apparently an abusive, terrible person. So g- great, great pull in this moment. Uh, so you’re this person. I am not impressed, therefore codifying and maybe canonizing the greatest example of, uh, men letting people down for absolutely no reason.

You were a beautiful person, Brad. You were given everything but we need you to be nice as well.

Kyle: Between the Lines of the lore strikes so perfectly and precisely at the heart of male insecurity. When they asked her about it, the bit with the nudes, she said, “Yeah, I heard about it.” I can’t remember if she said, “I heard about it,” or, “I saw it.” And my first thought was, “That don’t impress me much.” And what is the that she’s referring to?

Is it the idea that it leaked or is it h- the sight of his junk specifically? And I d- I don’t want or need to know. It works on either level, and a man for whom it would make the difference, again, it’s another Rorschach moment Any other song bits that you wanna hit on?

Cliff: There continues to be interesting parts from here on out for me, but they become a little less dense than they have been on the record up until this point They’re great songs with the possible exception, uh, I could call out of “Rock This Country” now has such a level of sheen to it that I cannot… it is actually a sort of like, I’m sorry, I can’t take this one quite seriously anymore on this.

It was already funny that a

Kyle: Canadian did

a 50

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, did a from here to here, from there to there type everybody, and then, to your point about some earlier lyrics like, oh, this one, oh, this one doesn’t mean things. Nope. Rock, we’re gonna rock this

Kyle: Rocked this country, uh, right out of this

world

Cliff: Which, is, an-en-enough as it is. It can just be funny and things can be maybe anachronistic in the modern sense. But two things are interesting about it. One is th-th-this apparently is the only one that did not need to get remixed for the international version. This one’s…

Oh, we’re good. We’re good on this one, actually. The one that’s

Kyle: full diesel America for the rest of the world

Cliff: But then it really felt 90s and even 2000s for me when I was trying to like place it, and then the internet is like, yeah, no, no, no. You remember before everything totally collapsed and Democrats were still doing the Steve Ballmer on stage type stuff of just like, let’s get very exci- Yeah.

So this was like the theme song for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign,

and the theme song for Hillary Clinton in 2008. It’s like, oh, okay. So I’ve ac- unfortunately, I’ve compiled a lot of reasons to dislike this song, which is great, ’cause there’s 15 other ones here. And luckily, if I’ve gotta make a pass through, like I said, they’re still interesting musically in every world, but by the time you, you get to “You’ve Got a Way,” it’s just a nice closer where another little nugget of instrumentation I think really makes its way out.

There’s a, a few mentions of a fretless bass being played on this album, and on that one you can really hear it, and it’s… It really adds something to it. You’ve got bass making really slow pitch changes and moves, that otherwise would usually require a different instrument or something like that, and is instead coming through just the actual playing of, uh, in that case, Joe Chemmay, the session bassist there.

Kyle: Hmm. It’s great. The “You’ve Got a Way,” a nice album closer, the third of three choices on this record alone that could be first dance at a wedding songs, was on the “Notting Hill” soundtrack. If you watch that video, it does the very 90s thing of cutting back and forth between Shania Twain performance and scenes of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.

the thing that I appreciate about this song, which is not normally my bag, is the, I have to assume intentional wordplay of the way she says, “You got a way with me,” not the contraction you’ve. You got, and then a way sounds like one word in it. Like you got a way with me, like you, you pulled it off in pulling me.

But also, on the flip side, you have a magic to you that draws me to you. There’s a lot embedded. Like it takes me back to Mr. Craig’s 10th grade English class, seeing how much meaning can be stuffed into just one line of a poem and how much personal meaning you can infuse into it when a line is really well designed.

So like we talk about often, I like lyrics less than I used to because of you, but I respect the ones that I respect even more because of the tension that this podcast has brought up again and again. And Shania is, by God, she’s as good an example of just potency. It’s earnest. It’s… I use it, I use this in the capital A way that country culture uses it in a loaded way.

It’s authentic, it’s true to her, but it’s also very clever and marketable. It has a, a mass appeal, I– So much of this record is like a product that created culture. It– The, the facets of it, like the repackaging it for the inter- not only for the international version, but all the remixing that got done of some of these songs, the, all the different versions of the duets that I mentioned earlier.

To me, there’s a sense of inviting as many people to the party as possible. They put all their chips on the table to make this record, and so they wanted everyone in the world to feel included, and there’s such an intentionality to that to me. And in pop music and thinking of yourself as a person from a small town of meager means who aspired to be an international pop star, that’s really like designing a map to get there, which speaks to a level of genius to me.

Um, and I, I think about an artist that I don’t like in Taylor Swift, who is a direct spiritual successor to this, and both of them have expressed a degree of admiration for each other. And Taylor has cited her influence a number of times. and I try to parse out, like, what’s the difference for me?

Like, am I just wrong about Taylor Swift? And that really says something about Shania, that she would f- force me to confront my, like, deepest anti-something bias in music. And insofar as I can tell, the, the difference for me is that inviting versus dividing bit. I think so much of what turns me off about Taylor’s music, and it’s, it’s fine for people to at us and be like: “You suck.

You are wrong. Taylor is the greatest artist of our generation.” That’s fine. I’m glad she gives you lots of love and meaning and memories in your life. All, all love and power to you. But so much of Taylor’s music is, like, the me of it all

Cliff: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: And that’s no shade to Taylor, and I’m sure there’s probably lots of moments that I’m not keyed into.

But I say all that to say a positive thing about Shania, and that’s there’s so much inviting and us and expansion, and so much of this record’s like a big hug, We talked about it with “Between the Buried and Me,” which is another– There’s so many names that I did not– would’ve never thought in a million years would be possible to invoke, uh, in this conversation.

But we talked with BTBAM, a challenging record like “Colors,” feeling designed to be for as many people as possible, and this has that same thing just at the largest possible human scale, which is such an incredible, incredible feat to be a blockbuster that anybody in any country can get into.

Cliff: Well said, and a decent primer for turning the corner into what to do next.

Kyle: If you can ever get yourself to stop listening to this record, ’cause I swear once you do, it’s, it’s hard to turn it off

Cliff: You know what? That tees me up anyway, so let me just do my bit really quick. I don’t have a lot of other places to send you. I think you should listen to this one and other Shania Twain records. If you have not in recent history, listened to them on purpose, they’re just really great. I usually am rubbed the wrong way by just, “Oh, I don’t know, check out some contemporaries and move around in the space and you’ll find a little bit of what you’re looking for.”

Um, other than the person we’ll definitely seriously mention here. That can work. You, you could find yourself in some interesting places, and I’m not mad if you’re listening to Tanya Tucker all of a sudden because you’ve just sort of moved one space to the right or left or something like that, listening to other country contemporaries.

I think there’s a lot of goodness there, especially in the ’90s. I mean, stated influences and sources include Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn, and I mentioned Tanya Tucker and Waylon Jennings, Lynn Anderson, Reba, Emmylou Harris, The Judds, all of them. You can’t go too wrong picking up on some of that.

You also a- although I’ll, only give this as much space as I’m actually saying here, especially right here in the late ’90s you’re, you got a pretty good wealth of female country artists who are doing cool stuff. Like Faith Hill is starting to write some pretty cool stuff at this point. We’re getting the Dixie Chicks and Wide Open Spaces.

Th- this is not my day-to-day listen, but it was a lot of what was in my life at the time. And a lot of it’s just really good. It’s just good standard blues-based country from good songwriters, right? Where a lot of the type of pop investment was still happening, uh, in country music and they were trying to make crossovers and the, there’s a lot of goodness there.

So, an unusually casual point over to like, yeah, you can maybe playlist your way to a handful of things here. I’ll allow a little bit of it. But if you’re gonna go straight to the top this is a reminder to listen to Dolly Parton for a thousand reasons.

Like maybe literally a thousand reasons, right?

Please go listen to Dolly. Even if you aren’t sure where to go after this at all and the only thing you can think of is Dolly, that’s not a bad place to land, and you’re gonna discover some things about how they influenced one of them or one another. And then I think the last one I’d mention, which we’ve done a few times, uh, or mentioned a couple of times, but Karen Carpenter was like low-key a mind-blowing musician on every level, and The Carpenters are an expressed influence here and one that you could have discerned anyway, uh, if you were looking for it.

So, um, l- learning about Karen Carpenter and listening to not only how good she was, but, um, also just another reminder she was a really good drummer, and that’s awesome.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: those were the, the kind of main areas that came up for me, and everywhere else I tried to point people was like, you know what? I’m fine with them just snapping back to whatever they find from here and/or whatever Kyle is gonna point me towards

Kyle: My list is very similar to yours. I do think– I don’t wanna take for granted our awareness of her peers in that moment versus other people being immersed in that moment. So all, all those people you mentioned, plus Martina McBride and Jo Dee Messina, and there’s some really straight up great songs in the body of work between those folks.

And there’s other people with, interesting political, like punk adjacent stuff, like the Dixie Chicks, still a great story embedded in that. The artist Caitlin Rose in a “Rolling Stone” interview where they were talking about, They were talking about Shania’s influence. Caitlin Rose had this great thing she said.

Reba’s brand was, “Somebody should leave.” Trisha’s was a little, “Please don’t leave.” And Faith had, “No one would ever leave me, obviously.” But Shania’s brand was, “I will take no s**t and all of your money. Thanks.” And it worked. Nobody stepped on Shania, especially not the men in her songs. So one thing that I love is how much love Shania gets, how clear it was that Shania was an empowering force for a lot of artists.

And that’s everyone from more obvious ones like modern country folks like Caitlin Rose, Maren Morris, but then folks like Harry Styles has said that Shania Twain in music and in fashion is one of his number one influences, uh, which is just a cool thing when you contemplate what a massive, massive artist and influence he is out in the world.

Big plus one to Dolly Parton especially, and other folks that you said of, that era. I know also gotta mention Linda Ronstadt, who she said was one of her top influences and was a mainstay in my house growing up. Linda Ronstadt, one of my mom’s favorite artists. I tried to think about, you know, we don’t have a Shan- surely we don’t have a Shania now, but if we did, who would it be?

And that’s always a dangerous and loaded question, but also a fun thing to get the table at the bar going. I’ve been watching Kacey Musgraves on this arena tour, and a lot of the moves that she’s making to be so herself and to be so radically inclusive to so many groups of people. And the disco balls, the disco scrotum is like millennial humor version of Shania Twain to me in a way.

It’s a little it’s a little edgy for Shania, but it’s like kind of in the same spirit, you know? It’s onl- only live me and you in this moment have a wink type of thing. Is she anywhere near as big as Shania? I don’t know. I don’t even know what that means or if anyone cares about that anymore.

But there is a similarity to the artistry and to the way they seem to try to make people feel the way they wanna make people feel, I think. In terms of like, is there one album with 20 pounds of bangers in a five-pound bag? Chappell Roan’s “Midwest Princess” feels spiritually a lot like this record in that regard, where you’re just like, “Holy s**t, every song on this record is the biggest song I’ve ever heard.”

There’s also a little something about Dua Lipa that feels Shania-y. Genre transcendent, highly, highly international, clearly from one place, but extremely multicultural just a can, can travel anywhere type of thing. That’s the closest equivalent of the Shania Twain international pop star phenomenon I’ve been able to find, and certainly the Dua Lipa that like brings artists of all different stripes to jam on songs with her live on tour.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Garth Brooks. She got compared unflatteringly, like they held up Garth Brooks as a, like, weird one’s Wario to the other. You know, one’s– They’re doing the same things, but like they both brought a rock star element to country in the ’90s, arenas and presentation and just huge, huge, huge, great songs.

And also the like Mutt Lange hair metal touches on this record reminded me of how the best of ’90s country really like minted a handful of true rock stars. And even though you can’t find Garth on streaming, you can go out and physical media his s**t. He’s in a, he’s in a bin at somebody’s yard sale right now, or you can go get all his CDs on eBay or whatever, and it’s worth it.

The last thing that I would wanna mention is the show “Broad City”. And I didn’t remember this until… I was like an avid watcher and I didn’t remember this until researching, but I forgot there was like a running gag about Shania. For the first three seasons, Abbi kept lying to get out of work or explain being late by claiming that she was personal training Shania.

And, apparently that just came from a play on tra- like train, training, train and twain. And eventually they had an episode they called “Twaining Day” because Shania’s very savvy team heard about the joke, and she wanted to get in on it. So she was in an episode, and she was such a delight, such a self-aware delight in that episode, which is so great ’cause it feels like the kind of thing that would be worlds apart from millennial girls running around New York City, and yet it’s like a perfect fit.

Shania can go anywhere and everywhere, to your point from the beginning of the episode. Why not “Broad City”? Why wouldn’t her… It j- it just to me is the perfect like button on the r- the breadth and depth of her influence that it would be a like, of course, you wouldn’t even have to question it about Shania Twain all these years after 1997, uh, that she would show up in a forum like this.

Cliff: Not that it’s on this record, but it’s cemented into my brain at the end of a “New Girl” episode when they hit the first note of “Any Man of Mine” and Coach drops into, like, a straight stare in the camera and then hits that line dance out of nowhere, and then everyone else comes up. It’s such a, like the the way that it exists as a little clip in my brain is so good because if you weren’t alive during the line dancing phenomenon, you don’t have a thread about what country was doing for a minute in the country, in the country that we rocked.

But just like the, to your point, right? She’s in “Broad City” and then here just kind of like shoved into an old episode of a classically tweeny millennial show is like a ref- a direct reference to Shania Twain and what she was doing in the 90s. Like, this is a pervasive cultural thing that has undoubtedly spawned things that we do and don’t enjoy downstream for sure, but it has spawned a lot.

Kyle: It’s because Coach, English class, seeing how much meaning can be stuffed into just one line of a poem and how much personal meaning you can infuse into it when a line is really well designed.

So like we talk about often, I, like lyrics less than I used to because of you, but I respect the ones that I respect even more because of the tension that this podcast has brought up again and again. And Shania is, by God, she’s as good an example of just potency. it’s earnest. It’s… I use this in the capital A way that country culture uses it in a loaded way.

It’s authentic, you know, it’s true to her, but it’s also very clever and marketable. It has a, a mass appeal, So much of this record is like a product that created culture. It– the facets of it, like the repackaging it, for the inter- not only for the international version, but all the remixing that got done of some of these songs, all the different versions of the duets that I mentioned earlier.

To me, there’s a sense of like inviting as many people to the party as possible. They put all their chips on the table to make this record, and so they wanted everyone in the world to feel included, and there’s such an intentionality to that to me. And in pop music and thinking of yourself as a person from a small town of meager means who aspired to be an international pop star, that’s really like designing a map to get there, which speaks to like a level of genius to me.

and I, I think about an artist that I don’t like in Taylor Swift, who is a direct spiritual successor to this, and both of them have expressed a degree of admiration for each other. and Taylor has cited her influence a number of times. And I try to parse out, like, what’s the difference for me?

Like, am I just wrong about Taylor Swift? And that really says something about Shania, that she would f- force me to confront my, like, deepest anti-something bias in music. And insofar as I can tell, the, the difference for me is that inviting versus dividing bit. Like, I think so much of what turns me off about Taylor’s music, and it’s, it’s fine for people to at us and be like: “You suck.

You are wrong. Taylor is the greatest artist of our generation.” That’s fine. I’m glad she gives you lots of love and meaning and memories in your life. All, all love and power to you. But so much of Taylor’s music is, like, the me of it all

Cliff: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: And that’s no shade to Taylor, and I’m sure there’s probably lots of moments that I’m not keyed into.

But I say all that to say a positive thing about Shania, and that’s there’s so much inviting and us and expansion, and so much of this record’s like a big hug, you know? We talked about it with “Between the Buried and Me,” which is another– There’s so many names that I did not– would’ve never thought in a million years would be possible to invoke, in this conversation.

But we talked with BTBAM, a challenging record like “Colors,” feeling designed to be for as many people as possible, and this has that same thing just at the largest possible human scale, which is such an incredible, incredible feat to be a blockbuster that anybody in any country can, can get into.

Cliff: Well said, and a decent primer for turning the corner into what to do next. If you can ever get yourself to stop listening to this record, ’cause I swear once you do, it’s, it’s hard to turn it off

You know what? That tees me up anyway, so let me just do my bit really quick. I don’t have a lot of other places to send you. I think you should listen to this one and other Shania Twain records. If you have not in recent history, listened to them on purpose, they’re just really great. I usually am rubbed the wrong way by just, “Oh, I don’t know, check out some contemporaries and move around in the space and you’ll find a little bit of what you’re looking for.”

Um, other than the person we’ll definitely seriously mention here. That can work. You, you could find yourself in some interesting places, and I’m not mad if you’re listening to Tanya Tucker all of a sudden because you’ve just sort of moved one space to the right or left or something like that, listening to other country contemporaries.

I think there’s a lot of goodness there, especially in the ’90s. I mean, stated influences and sources include Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn, and I mentioned Tanya Tucker and Waylon Jennings, Lynn Anderson, Reba, Emmylou Harris, The Judds, all of them. You can’t go too wrong picking up on some of that.

You also, a- although I’ll, I’ll only give this as much space as I’m actually saying here, especially right here in the late ’90s, you’re, you got a pretty good wealth of female country artists who are doing cool stuff. Like Faith Hill is starting to write some pretty cool stuff at this point. We’re getting the Dixie Chicks and Wide Open Spaces.

th- this is not my day-to-day listen, but it was a lot of what was in my life at the time. And a lot of it’s just really good. It’s just good standard blues-based country, from, good songwriters, right? Where a lot of the type of pop investment was still happening, uh, in country music and they were trying to make crossovers and the, there’s a lot of goodness there.

So, uh, an, an unusually casual point over to like, yeah, you can maybe playlist your way to a handful of things here. I’ll allow a little bit of it. but if you’re gonna go straight to the top, this is a reminder to listen to Dolly Parton for a thousand reasons.

maybe literally a thousand reasons, right?

Please go listen to Dolly. even if you aren’t sure where to go after this at all and the only thing you can think of is Dolly, that’s not a bad place to land, and you’re gonna discover some things about how they influenced one another. And then I think the last one I’d mention, which we, we’ve done a few times, uh, or mentioned a couple of times, but, um, Karen Carpenter was like low-key a mind-blowing musician on every level, and The Carpenters are an expressed influence here and one that you could have discerned anyway, uh, if you were looking for it.

So, um, learning about Karen Carpenter and listening to not only how good she was, but, um, also just another reminder she was a really good drummer, and that’s awesome.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: those were the, the kind of main areas that came up for me, and everywhere else I tried to point people was like, you know what? I’m fine with them just snapping back to whatever they find from here and/or whatever Kyle is gonna point me towards

Kyle: My list is very similar to yours. I do think– I don’t wanna take for granted our awareness of her peers in that moment versus other people being immersed in that moment. So all, all those people you mentioned, plus Martina McBride and Jo Dee Messina, and there’s, there’s some really straight up great songs in the body of work between those folks.

And there’s other people with, you know, interesting political, like punk adjacent stuff, like the Dixie Chicks, still a great story embedded in that. the artist Caitlin Rose in a “Rolling Stone” interview where They were talking about Shania’s influence. Caitlin Rose had this great thing she said.

Reba’s brand was, “Somebody should leave.” Trisha’s was a little, “Please don’t leave.” And Faith had, “No one would ever leave me, obviously.” But Shania’s brand was, “I will take no s**t and all of your money. Thanks.” And it worked. Nobody stepped on Shania, especially not the men in her songs. so one thing that I love is how much love Shania gets, how clear it was that Shania was an empowering force for a lot of artists.

And that’s everyone from more obvious ones like modern country folks like Caitlin Rose, Maren Morris, but then folks like Harry Styles has said that Shania Twain in music and in fashion is one of his number one influences, uh, which is just a cool thing when you contemplate what a massive, massive artist and influence he is out in the world.

big plus one to Dolly Parton especially, and other folks that you said of, that era. I know also gotta mention Linda Ronstadt, who she said was one of her top influences and was a mainstay in my house growing up. Linda Ronstadt, one of my mom’s favorite artists. I tried to think about, surely we don’t have a Shania now, but if we did, who would it be?

And that’s always a dangerous and loaded question, but also a fun thing to get the table at the bar going. I’ve been watching Kacey Musgraves on this arena tour, and a lot of the moves that she’s making to be so herself and to be so radically inclusive to so many groups of people. And the disco balls, the disco scrotum is like millennial humor version of Shania Twain to me in a way.

It’s a little, it’s, it’s a little edgy for Shania, but it’s like kind of in the same spirit, you know? It’s onl- only live me and you in this moment have a wink type of thing. you know, is she anywhere near as big as Shania? I don’t know. I don’t even know what that means or if anyone cares about that anymore.

But there is a similarity to the artistry and to the way they seem to try to make people feel the way they wanna make people feel, I think. in terms of like, is there one album with 20 pounds of bangers in a five-pound bag? Chappell Roan’s “Midwest Princess” feels spiritually a lot like this record in that regard, where you’re just like, “Holy s**t, every song on this record is the biggest song I’ve ever heard.”

there’s also a little something about Dua Lipa that feels, Shania-y. Genre transcendent, highly, highly international, you know? clearly from one place, but extremely multicultural, just a can, can travel anywhere type of thing. That’s the closest equivalent of the Shania Twain international pop star phenomenon I’ve been able to find, and certainly the Dua Lipa that like brings artists of all different stripes to jam on songs with her live on tour.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Garth Brooks. she got compared unflatteringly, like they held up Garth Brooks as a, like, weird one’s Wario to the other. You know, one’s– They’re doing the same things, but like they both brought a rock star element to country in the ’90s, arenas and presentation and just huge, huge, huge, great songs.

and also the like Mutt Lange hair metal touches on this record reminded me of how the best of ’90s country really like minted a handful of true rock stars. and even though you can’t find Garth on streaming, you can go out and physical media his s**t. he’s in a bin at somebody’s yard sale right now, or you can go get all his CDs on eBay or whatever, and it’s worth it.

the last thing that I would wanna mention is the show “Broad City”. and I didn’t remember this until… I was like an avid watcher, and I didn’t remember this until researching, but I forgot there was like a running gag about Shania. for the first three seasons, Abbi kept lying to get out of work or explain being late by claiming that she was personal training Shania.

And, you know, apparently that just came from a play on tra- like train, training, train and twain. And eventually they had an episode they called “Twaining Day” because Shania’s very savvy team heard about the joke, and she wanted to get in on it. So she was in an episode, and she was such a delight, such a self-aware delight in that episode, which is so great ’cause it feels like the kind of thing that would be worlds apart from millennial girls running around New York City, and yet it’s like a perfect fit.

Shania can go anywhere and everywhere, to your point from the beginning of the episode. Why not “Broad City”? Why wouldn’t her… It j- it just to me is the perfect button on the breadth and depth of her influence that it would be a like, of course, you wouldn’t even have to question it about Shania Twain all these years after 1997, uh, that she would show up in a forum like this.

Cliff: Not that it’s on this record, but it’s cemented into my brain at the end of a “New Girl” episode when they hit the first note of “Any Man of Mine” and Coach drops into, like, a straight stare in the camera and then hits that line dance out of nowhere, and then everyone else comes up. it’s such a, like the way that it exists as a little clip in my brain is so good because if you weren’t alive during the line dancing phenomenon, you don’t have a thread about what country was doing for a minute in the country, in the country that we rocked. Um But just like the, to your point, right? She’s in “Broad City” and then here just kind of like shoved into an old episode of a classically tweeny millennial show is like a ref- a direct reference to Shania Twain and what she was doing in the 90s. Like, this is a pervasive cultural thing that has undoubtedly spawned things that we do and don’t enjoy downstream for sure, but it has spawned a lot.

Kyle: It’s because Coach, like so many others have come to understand and embody the universal truth that Shania espoused, and that’s, “I wanna be free and feel the way I feel.”