300. Shania Twain, "Come on Over"

 


Would you be surprised if I told you this is the best selling album by a female artist of all time?  I was mildly surprised!  It's also the best-selling "country" album of all time, but I'm going to go all music snob here and say it's more country-adjacent than actual country.  In fact, one of the things that's surprised me about this list is how little country there is on it.  This is, of course, a result of who Rolling Stone solicited votes from.  I think they did an admirable job of expanding beyond the usual white male rock crowd and a miserable job of asking the country music world.  Who knows, maybe the best 50 country albums of all time are coming up, but I doubt it.

Back to Shania.  She wrote these songs with famous producer/then husband Robert "Mutt" Lange and turned over production entirely to him, which is why this sounds like a high-gloss BMW 7-series instead of an old Ford pickup.  To say it is carefully crafted and slickly produced is a wild understatement.  There is not a note, not a snare hit, not a single breath on this album that Mutt Lange did not spend a considerable amount of time thinking about and placing.  That's probably why people loved it so much!

I did not love it so much.  This is not really my kind of music and the slick production just does not work for me.  There is an international version where they remixed all the songs to make them even LESS country; what I would like is a Nashville version where they remixed the songs to make them MORE country.  Maybe just the original demos would be better than this shiny object.

If you were alive in the 90's, you already know a bunch of these songs.  I knew a bunch of them, and I never listened to the radio in the 90's.  That's how thoroughly they suffused the collective consciousness.  You've got your "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" and "Come On Over" and "If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask!"  There are a disturbing number of songs that end in exclamation points.  

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? It's the best selling album by a female artist of all time.

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