Shania's Secret Side

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Shania wants to play four of her new songs. She turns up the volume, hollers out an occasional factoid (''That's a 40-piece orchestra!''), but mostly she's all concentration. Focus. She's listening for flaws.

There aren't any. Like all her collaborations with Mutt, each track is a painstakingly hand-tooled piece of radio marzipan -- sweet and glazed and shiny. The first single, ''I'm Gonna Getcha Good!,'' sounds like Pink fronting Electric Light Orchestra; you can almost hear Mutt, the Dr. Frankenstein who gave life to riff monsters like AC/DC's ''Back in Black'' and Def Leppard's ''Pyromania,'' cackling as he tosses in hook after hook, just to taunt you, just because he can. (Later she'll shoot a million-dollar video for the song, a CGI-heavy sci-fi spectacle involving robots, flying motorcycles, and a curve-hugging catsuit.) Gargantuan sales are more or less a fait accompli.

Twain and the elder pharisees of Nashville have often held each other at arm's length, but this stuff she's cranking up on the car stereo has roughly as much bourbon-splattered honky-tonk as the UNESCO building in Geneva. In a business that usually caters to one niche sliver at a time, Shania and Mutt plan to do something bold and broad with ''UP!'': People who buy it will get two versions of its 19 tracks, one platter of glossy globo-pop, and another disc countryfied with fiddles and banjos and steel guitars. ''We've geared the music to please everybody,'' she says.

They toyed with that sonic strategy with ''Come On Over''; Shania's breakthrough hit single in 1998, ''You're Still the One,'' was actually a pop version lifted from a European import. Mutt is said to have hundreds of micro-demographic mixes of ''UP!'' ready for global single releases, enough to make sure that nobody -- Love Paraders in Berlin, bauxite miners in Cameroon, yak herders in Outer Mongolia -- will be able to resist Shania's adaptable, panhumanitarian spores. ''I am capable of thinking in all of those directions,'' she says. ''They're all me. All the different Shanias.''

Well, one Shania does go unheard, and she's on tape somewhere back at the château. For all the agony that runs through Shania Twain's life, you don't hear a lot of it in her work. The songs that she and Mutt write are shorn of idiosyncrasy and constructed like high-concept Hollywood movies (Good Girl Goes Wild, or Working Woman Comes Home to Hubby). They're wedding songs, strip-joint songs. They've got more exclamation points than a Tom Wolfe novel: ''Man! I Feel Like a Woman!'' ''Rock This Country!'' ''If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask!'' The lyrics can be strict on the subject of human frailty (''Get a life -- get a grip''...''I don't need a shrink to tell me what to think''...''No more cryin' in the corner/No excuses...''). From the standpoint of personal history they reveal nothing at all, so it's probably naive to expect rampant bean-spilling from Shania herself.

Shania's real secret is that she DOES write songs full of anguish and confusion. She just doesn't want you to hear them. She doesn't even like Mutt to hear them. For a long time she wouldn't let him dip into her private stash of musical Watergate tapes. ''On this record he insisted,'' she says. ''He just said, 'Look, let me listen to your tapes.' I had a really hard time. When he listens to that stuff, I feel so vulnerable.'' The existence of the tapes is news even to the head of her record label. ''God, there's no way for you to find out about those songs, is there?'' laughs Luke Lewis, chairman of Mercury Nashville. ''She hasn't told me about 'em, either. Give 'em up, girl, I wanna hear 'em now.''

Let's hope Lewis is a patient man. ''If I was just to write on my emotions all the time, I doubt I would ever have a hit,'' Shania says. ''Because I think you can get lost in your own self-indulgence. I go off on my own. I write all kinds of things. I tape them. It's therapeutic for me. I'm satisfied with just doing that for myself, and I don't feel the need to make those my records. If you look at someone's diary, it's just full of scribbles, there's so many imperfections, it would just be so artsy -- I'm not sure to how many people it would make sense. When I'm writing a song that I plan on sharing with the world, then I want to make it something that entertains them.''

But say you were to put out a song about your parents dying...

''I would never,'' she says.

To read more about Shania Twain and ''UP!,'' check out the Nov. 8, 2002, issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine.