25 Country Albums You Need to Hear (Even If You Hate Country Music)

17. COME ON OVER
Shania Twain
Touting Twain as a great country artist tends to result in a lot of eye-rolling and cuckoo finger-spinning responses. Never mind that Come On Over is the biggest-selling album of the SoundScan era, with 15 million certified scans, or that the RIAA also rates it as one of the half-dozen biggest sellers of all time, certified as 20-time platinum; in some purists' minds, those stats are just further strikes against her. But nobody does bubblegum like Shania and her producer-husband, Robert ''Mutt'' Lange — whether you're buying the original country mix of the album or the pop remix. And it's not just ear candy: There's a real, underlying feminism in these exclamation point-riddled anthems that's squarely in the tradition of Loretta Lynn.