By the time the new millennium rolled over, Shania Twain’s legacy was secure. With her 1997 blockbuster Come On Over, the Canadian singer established a fresh mold for modern women in country and pop music, inspiring the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris, and Taylor Swift to make their own way. She’s beloved by everybody from Harry Styles to Haim, Orville Peck to Post Malone, and her songs have become staples of weddings, karaoke nights, and any band looking for a crowd-pleasing cover.
After a decade that brought a son, a divorce, and a life-altering autoimmune illness, Twain mounted a formal “comeback” in 2017 that shifted her closer to typical pop arrangements. At the time, she told Rolling Stone that she wanted to make music that was as far away as possible from what she’d made with Robert “Mutt” Lange, her acrimoniously departed ex-husband and the producer of her most commercially successful work. She accomplished that with Now, which drew more heavily on rock and Top 40 pop textures while keeping a relatively even keel. She goes even further on Queen of Me, where she serves up a dozen tracks of optimistic affirmations and pumping electro-pop rhythms. This latest chapter, however, is a case of diminishing returns.
Twain’s team of co-writers and producers have past credits with Halsey, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Fred again.., and Iggy Azalea, and too often the material they’ve assembled for Twain feels like third-tier scraps intended for other clients. Queen of Me’s bland and plasticine arrangements are a far cry from the energy and sizzle of hits like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.” The cheers of “Queen!” in the title track sound half-hearted at best, hitched to a plodding rhythm that proceeds with all the pizazz of a conveyor belt. First, though, you’ll have to get past the stilted opening lines, where Twain insists that she is neither girl nor boy, baby nor toy: She is, in fact, a queen.
She’s still got some of that country flavor, but instead of a seamless crossover, it makes for an awkward combo. The album’s fist-pumping introduction “Giddy Up!” nods at her twangy bona fides with a peppy acoustic guitar melody and lyrics about heading out west from Ohio—never mind that she’s lived in Switzerland for more than 20 years—and a rhythmic, disco-lite bridge soon indicates that she’s not planning to stick around the ranch. “Got litty in the cup,” she bleats, as though that is a perfectly natural turn of phrase for a 57-year-old white woman. Twain peppers other songs with awkward, forcibly modern idioms, like when she sings “I deleted our history” on “Brand New.”