Album Review: Shania Twain – Queen of Me
2 min read
Country-pop sensation, Shania Twain, makes an enthusiastic return with her first album in years – Queen of Me. The star once dominated the charts with hits like Man! I Feel Like A Woman and You’re Still the One, but after contracting Lyme disease, Twain’s vocal cords and ability to sing were seriously impacted. However, after serious throat surgery to help save the star’s voice, Twain is back with her lower, raspier tone!
Of course it wouldn’t be a Twain album without any country music, and Queen of Me kicks off with catchy country bop Giddy Up, the perfect song for all those cowgirls out there. The rest of the album focuses more on dance-pop anthems which explore Twain’s usual themes of love, relationships and heartbreak. Such as Waking Up Dreaming, an eighties sounding, up-tempo track featuring Twain’s harmonies and Best Friend debuting Twain’s powerful vocals throughout the chorus despite her previous struggles with her voice. As we all know it hasn’t always been sunshine and rainbows for Twain, and Pretty Liar could be a reference to the star’s messy divorce, where her ex-husband, Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange was caught having an affair with her former assistant and friend, as Twain sings ‘He swears to me there’s no one else in his heart / I’m chokin’ on the fumes of a liar’.
However, after about three pop songs with the same over exaggerated mediocre melody, Queen Of Me does start to sound slightly repetitive. And the self-empowerment lyrics that Twain is trying to force on listeners appear to lack any real depth. The title track which sees Twain sing ‘ I’m not a girl, I’m not a boy / I’m not a baby, I’m not a toy / I’m a queen’ over a muddled beat, and the country sounding Not Just a Girl with Twain saying she’s ‘gonna be somebody someday’; all seem over the top and unrelatable coming from a world superstar sensation who has already achieved so much.
There’s no denying that Queen of Me isn’t a fun, infectious pop album… if it were released in the early 00s. However in 2023, the melodies sound dated and the lyrics bland, with no new revelations since Twain in the 90s. Although it is great to have the Queen of country back when you take into account everything she has been through from her divorce to voice struggles, Twain definitely peaked in the 90s.
