A stone floor and walls that threw the sound back like a canyon. That was the room where drummer Paul Leim laid down the beat for the biggest gamble of Shania Twain's career. The Canadian singer and her producer, Robert John 'Mutt' Lang, were not making a polite country record. They wanted something huge, and they started with the room itself.
Release and writing partnership
On November 4, 1997, the album those sessions produced, Come On Over, came out in North America on Mercury Records. It was Twain's third studio album, and every song on it was written by Twain and Lang together. Lang was also her husband at the time, which made the project both a marriage and a high-stakes business partnership.
The recording process was fast and deliberate. The main tracks were cut in three weeks at Masterfonics Tracking Room in Nashville, with Leim playing in that reflective stone room. For the violins, Lang invited four players to perform the same part in unison, stacking their sound into something far bigger than a typical country fiddle section. The goal was a record that could fill arenas. The writing had begun long before the Nashville sessions. Twain drafted lyrics at Michael Bolton's house in New Jersey while Lang worked on Bolton's 1995 hits collection. She captured ideas in a notebook, on a dictaphone, or on a MiniDisc, and one song, 'You've Got a Way', had existed since 1994.
Country instruments with rock riffs
The sound they built mixed country instruments, acoustic guitars, fiddles and pedal steel, with rock riffs and electric guitars. Critics would call it country-pop with pop and rock influences, but the label mattered less than the effect. When the international version arrived on February 16, 1998, it pushed even further toward pop, with a different track list and a brighter production.
The singles told the story. Come On Over contained twelve of them, including 'You're Still the One', 'From This Moment On', 'That Don't Impress Me Much' and 'Man! I Feel Like a Woman!'. Three reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. Twain had not just crossed over from country to pop, she had parked herself in the middle of both worlds and refused to leave.
Mixed reviews and crossover criticism
Not everyone was convinced. The album drew mixed reviews, with praise for its crossover appeal and criticism aimed at the lyrics and at whether it belonged in country music at all. Twain had intended the record as a conversational statement of her personality and beliefs, touching on romance and female empowerment with humour. The sceptics did not slow it down.
In the Billboard 200, Come On Over climbed to number two, and it topped the charts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Worldwide sales passed forty million copies. It became the best-selling studio album by a woman in history and the best-selling country album ever recorded. A record that some said was not country enough now defined the genre's commercial ceiling. The industry kept adding milestones. In 2004, the RIAA certified the album twenty times platinum. Five years earlier, at the 41st Grammy Awards, it had been nominated for Album of the Year and Best Country Album. By then the record had already become a fixture in Twain's catalogue, sitting between The Woman in Me and Up!.
A record that some said was not country enough now defined the genre's commercial ceiling.
The risk had been enormous. Twain and Lang wrote every song together, chased a sound that mixed Nashville instruments with rock muscle, and pushed the production toward pop for the international market. The result was an album that outsold every other studio record by a woman, ever. That stone room in Nashville still echoes.