Music legend Shania Twain has revealed the horror Australian experience she endured – yet bizarrely she had no idea it had even happened until the next day.
The Man I Feel Like a Woman star has also spoken of the Aussie TikTok star she’d love to collab with. And of the controversy she initially caused in country music scene she later went onto dominate, adding she still doesn’t “know why it was a problem”.
Get used to seeing wall to wall Twain from today due to her being the star of a new ad for Uber that will only be aired in Australia.
She’s the latest American star to work with Uber in their Aussie ads.
All of the previous ads have aimed to make potential customers chortle – from Michelle Williams not being recognised in Sydney despite being one third of a pop super group, Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander being pursued by canned laughter or Cher being burned at the stake as a witch.
Twain isn’t fazed by this lineage: “Ours is going to be the funniest ad,” she confidently told news.com.au from Toronto in her home country of Canada.
“It’s pee your pants funny”.
A lot of that’s due, she said, to working with Sydney comedian and music icon Tom Cardy on the ad.
Cardy has gone gangbusters on TikTok and YouTube with his witty ditties on everyday oddities.
“It was so much fun. Tom is really, really brilliant. And he’s nice, he’s easy to be around, and that just makes everything flow effortlessly.
“It was like hanging with a friend, in the back seat of an Uber.”
The ad sees Cardy in the back of an Uber singing about the things you can only do if you’re not driving, when Twain magically appears to join his musical performance.
Indeed, she and Cardy helped write the tune from the ad which features multiple references to Twain’s hits.
What about a future collaboration with the viral Aussie?
“I think we sound really good together and I could imagine writing something (together) that isn’t even Shania. Like, just get in a room and write some funny stuff,” Twain said.
The superstar admitted she was “totally a car singer”.
Like Australia, Twain’s home of Canada is a huge nation with major cities hours apart a long car trips between.
“I’ve been a car singer ever since I was a small child, always hogging the radio.
“I was the annoying one singing along. But what are you gonna do if you’re on a five, six or seven hour car ride?
‘Still don’t know the problem’
With over 100 million records sold, Twain is one of the best-selling artists in history and the best-selling female country musician ever. Her album Come on Over is the seventh highest selling album of all time. Not bad for a girl Timmins, a small city in rural Canada, a thousand miles from Nashville.
Nonetheless, she initially shocked the country world. Twain was accused of blurring the boundaries of what was the country genre and selling sex appeal as much as music – frowned up on by some in country’s conservative circles.
County Music Television even banned one of her music videos unable to subject its audience to Twain’s midriff.
It all seems a long time ago now. But there are shades of her treatment with Beyoncé’s who was also frowned up on by some in the country scene.
“I still don’t know why it was a problem,” she told news.com.au.
“I’m from a part of the world where we get we have very short summers. I did not spend a lot of my youth wearing a bathing suit.
“I was always quite shy about exposing my skin – it’s not something I ever felt comfortable with.
“Then you go to Nashville, it’s hot there. You’re going to be in a bikini, you go to the lake.
“So when I did the midriff look, I’m thinking, how can anyone not? How could anyone have a problem with that? It’s just a belly button, and I’ve been dying to be in a bathing suit for years”.
“’Yeah, I’m definitely going for it, I’m going for the midriff,’” she remembers thinking.
‘Silently screaming’: Horror Aussie introduction
It’s been a while since Twain toured Australia. Perhaps you can’t blame her after an experience that left a family member “silently screaming”.
“I was on tour in Australia, my sister was with me and we’re sharing a bed and I go to sleep first because I’ve a show the next day.
“Before my sister turns the lamp off she lays down and, on the ceiling, is a giant cockroach, a cockroach the size of nothing she’s ever seen before in her life.
“In northern Ontario we don’t have cockroaches that big.
“So she silently screams and is running around the room in panic because she doesn’t know what to do,” said Twain.
“She doesn’t want to wake me up, but it’s bad. It falls on the bed. She’s panicking. Doesn’t want it to go near me, but she can’t wake me up”.
Her sister rang to the room next door and demanded the inhabitant get rid of the creep crawly quickly.
“The two of them catch the cockroach and all this goes on with the lights on, and I never knew a thing till the next day.
“I would have not slept that night if I knew about, because, you know the story, when there’s one, there’s more”.
Twain insisted, however, that was “the only bad experience I’ve ever had in Australia”.
“I really loved my time there: I was out riding a horse in the countryside outside of Melbourne and we were really enjoying nature and that was my favourite part.”
Twain songs are bangers, there’s no doubt: You’re Still the One, That Don’t Impress Me Much. Floor fillers all. But does she ever thinks she’s unleased a beast with their popularity? Does she get sick of belting them out on stage?
“I really just embrace it. There’s no audience repeated twice.
“And I’m looking at these people all night. I’m just enjoying their expressions and their stories; I’m trying to understand them and get to know them just by looking at them.
“So that is already enough.”
