by Shania Twain
15
New to Nashville
As much as I loved living the hermetic life in a remote cabin in the woods, this was still an uncomfortably scary period of transition for me. I was involved in what amounted to a long-distance relationship with my new record label because I could not afford to move to Nashville. Yet I was expected to fly 1,500 miles down there whenever they wanted me to spend time finding the right songs. I needed to be there in person for the listening sessions, as they were literally at the publishing houses. I would get couriered packages with cassette tapes brimming with songs to consider as well, but much of the serious shopping for hit tunes was done in person. Today we’re able to just email songs in seconds, and being somewhere in person or waiting for a couriered package in order to hear potential songs to record just isn’t necessary. In fact, whole recording sessions are done over things like “source connect” on the Pro Tools recording program on the Internet.
It came as a great relief when PolyGram finally advanced me $20,000, a fortune to me at the time, enabling me to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a newly built complex called the Landings, in the suburb of Brentwood. I’d fully expected to live in another dive, given my limited finances, but this was nice: brand-new range, a balcony off the living room—even a washer and dryer. No more scrubbing clothes on rocks down by the river! The grounds had a swimming pool and a circuit around the buildings that made for lovely evening walks. I could not believe that the rent was so reasonable; to me, this was living in the lap of luxury. I felt like I was moving up in the world.
In the summer of 1992, I packed my Jimmy to the roof with every household item I owned. The rear window and the side windows were completely blocked, but I made the two-day drive from Timmins to Nashville safely.
By now, I even had my first credit card. To be honest, I was surprised by how easy it was to obtain one in the States. In Canada, card companies were far more discriminating about extending credit to people without a full-time job. And you’d have thought that my not being a U.S. citizen would have made it even harder. Nope! I wasn’t complaining, though. Having credit really helped me to cover my butt during the dry months to come.
Harold Shedd and Norro Wilson were the producers of my first CD. Harold owned a famous studio called the Music Mill, where countless gold and platinum records had been recorded over the years, and I was even lucky enough to meet Glen Campbell in the hall once. I always loved Glen’s voice, so it was a big moment for me to see him in person and be recording in the same building that he was.
Although Norro believed in me as a songwriter, I think he felt I wasn’t quite there yet and needed the support of Nashville’s writing community to find hit songs. Nor was Harold Shedd satisfied with the caliber of my songwriting just yet. On my first several trips down to Nashville, and after I moved there, the number one order of business was to carry on shopping for songs for me to record. The term “shopping” might sound a bit funny, but this is how we actually refer to looking for songs. Although not exactly in the context of “Attention, shoppers. In aisle seven, we’re having a sale on tear-jerking country ballads. That’s aisle seven!” So of course you don’t walk around pushing a cart, but the publishers push songs, and the producers and artists scan the choices till they’re satisfied they’ve found just the right list of goodies to take to the studio.
Usually it was Norro and I, and sometimes Harold, who would go down to Music Row, the hub of the country music industry. It’s like one-stop shopping for becoming a recording artist. Within a radius of several blocks, you pass recording studios, record companies, and the offices of artist-management firms, public relations consultants, production outfits, song publishing companies—you name it. If this were New York City or Los Angeles, the other two major nuclei of the U.S. music business, they would all be housed in imposing corporate-looking buildings and skyscrapers. What makes Music Row so unique to me is its quaintness: the tree-lined streets are full of charming houses with wood-planked verandas and deep porches. The only way you would know that those are the studios, and headquarters, and so on, are the discreet plaques above the doors, bearing the businesses’ names. There are more mortar, metal, and glass structures on Music Row now that have cut into the charm of the smaller converted homes, so the feel is different today.
Imagine my surprise the first time I set foot in PolyGram’s Nashville office, which was in a large, inviting-looking three-story house with a white porch. It certainly made meeting the label head Harold Shedd for the first time less daunting than it would have been ordinarily. Music Row had an authenticity and warmth to it that just made it easier for a small-town girl like me to adjust.
That was true of Nashville in general. It was apparent to me right away that I’d been given a break by getting my professional start there. To be honest, if my introduction to the United States had come in the Big Apple or Hollywood, for example, I might have found it too overwhelming, at least at first.
The Music City of the early 1990s was less populated, slower paced, and more family oriented than other music industry hubs of the larger centers and certainly than it is now. When I first laid eyes on the surrounding countryside, I was charmed by the horse ranches that sprawled out in every direction, their miles of triple-rail fences framing vast stretches of pastoral, picturesque landscapes. I especially liked the Brentwood and Franklin areas south of the city, which called to mind country classics such as John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and Porter Wagoner’s “Green, Green Grass of Home.” (You’re probably most familiar with the 1967 version by Welshman Tom Jones, but Porter had a big country hit with it two years earlier.) When I was growing up, those songs planted in my mind images of the Old South. Now they were coming to life for me: plantation homes, black-eyed peas, muddy rivers, watermelon wine. For quite a while after my move to Tennessee, I felt as if I were living on a movie set.
All in all, I think I adapted to my new home pretty well for someone who had never been outside of Canada before. There was so much I wasn’t used to. But it was all good. Like, grocery stores being open twenty-four hours a day? Get out of here! I couldn’t believe their size, either, or the fact that some of these so-called megastores sold everything from movies, to liquor, to tires—even guns. A completely new concept to me. If I needed to go out and buy milk at three in the morning, I could. Whoa.
In my international travels, I’ve found that Canadians are often stereotyped as being a friendly people with a good sense of humor. I found Southerners to be much the same, although more formally mannered, addressing a lady as “ma’am,” for example. Southern people cursed a lot less than Northern Ontarians as well. When a Northern Canadian gets mad, it’s not uncommon for a string of “Jes*s f*cking Chr*st!”s to come out of his mouth, and the French Canadians have some doozies, too. Sometimes, though, the friendliness of the South was misinterpreted by the likes of a Canadian girl, as when total strangers walking toward you on the street would smile and say, “Hello, how ya’ll doin’ today?” I didn’t always respond, for the simple reason that I wasn’t sure they were actually speaking to me, even though they looked right at me and seemed so sincere. Why would someone I’ve never seen before in my life care how I’m doing today? was my thinking.
You know what else kind of caught me off guard initially? The very American propensity to happily share personal information with a perfect stranger. A store clerk might say to me, “Well, hello there, how can I help you today? My name is Jennifer if you need anything, honey.” Responding in an equally laid-back, uninhibited manner sometimes got me bombarded with personal questions as well as intimate secrets on the other side, whether I asked for it or not, and sometimes the information just kept coming, like, “You know, I tried that shirt on when it first came in, but my husband told me I was too fat to wear bright colors, so I decided to just stick to black instead. I think your color is red. You’re a bright-color person, I can tell. Are you married? Does your husband like color or does he prefer more subtle
tones? Sometimes I think we worry too much about what men think, don’t you agree?” I was taken by this friendliness, and it made me feel welcome.
In addition to this warm, personal charm, among the many other things that I would grow to love about the South was its food, primarily since I was still a carnivore back then. “Meat ’n’ threes,” a local staple, became a regular thing for me because it was not only cheap but also home cooked. The components vary, but as the name suggests, you get one serving of a meat dish plus three sides. I fell in love with corn bread, which I’d never tasted before, and iced tea was new to me, too. In Ontario, when you ask for tea, you get hot tea. In the South, if you don’t specify “hot,” you automatically get iced tea.
Since I was from the North, living in the South took a serious cultural adjustment. When I saw chicken-fried steak on a menu for the first time, I was perplexed; I just could not imagine what on earth that could be. Didn’t really matter: I was never able to wrap my head around the idea of eating steak coated in batter and deep-fried like Kentucky Fried Chicken, so I avoided it. I shamelessly became a pig for barbecue, though. Seeing this on a menu, I asked the waitress, “Barbecued what?” Was it steak? Chicken? She patiently explained that barbecue was just the way of cooking but referred specifically to pork meat smoked slowly on the barbecue, with a spicy sauce that was to die for. Thinking about my porking out on this Southern delight now makes me feel guilty, as it was not only very fattening, it was an animal, after all, something I wouldn’t take any pleasure in eating now. One might wonder why, if I enjoyed these meat dishes so much, I would stop eating them. I became a vegetarian after reading a book called Diet for a New America by John Robbins, which Mutt gave me not long after my arrival in Nashville, nearing twenty years ago now. I’m sure my heart and waistline are now better off, too. My carnivorous days are over, and I say that with great conviction.
If only my adjustment to the music business had been as easy as my transition to my new home.
PolyGram’s decision for me to record other people’s songs and not my own was disappointing but not surprising. I understood when I got to Nashville that I would have to prove myself and that it was not all just going to fall in my lap overnight. I viewed my situation as a good start and continued to write constantly in my apartment. I fully believed that if I were patient and persevered, I would get my chance to shine as a songwriter in the not-too-distant future.
But I have to say, most of the music pitched to me for that first album was formulaic, cookie-cutter stuff. One thing, however, that did impress me of the countless listening sessions was the sonic quality of the recordings. They were only demos, but the musicianship and arrangements sounded so good; I couldn’t wait to hear what my actual, finished CD would sound like when it was all recorded and mixed. But the songs just weren’t there. Part of the reason for that had to do with my place in the Nashville artist hierarchy. In short, I was not part of it! I was this newcomer from another country and somewhat against the grain in every way. Artists are always looking for hit songs to record, and that includes country music stars, who typically got the pick of the choicest material. Hey, if you’re a songwriter or the song’s publisher, it stands to reason that you would give your strumming hand to have your pride and joy adopted by a megastar with platinum record sales. I was at the bottom of the first picks.
Likewise, I agreed with PolyGram’s suggestion that I try collaborating with other songwriters in town. These writing sessions were booked like doctors’ appointments: you sat in an office at a publishing company and had three hours or so to be artistically productive while the clock ticked down. I found it difficult to write anything worthwhile in such a setting and under time pressure. It’s just not conducive to creativity. I did manage to place one song of mine on the first album, “God Ain’t Gonna Getcha for That,” but I think it was accepted only because I’d cowritten the tune with a proven hit maker named Kent Robbins, a future member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Our song was not a hit, but it was a pleasant experience writing with Kent, and I remember him fondly as being easy to get along with and kind to me as a newcomer. Tragically, he died in a car accident at only fifty years old.
Timed sessions booked by appointment were how I was experiencing the recording scene in Nashville. It harked back to the compartmentalization that existed in popular music prior to the early 1960s. Musicians played instruments, singers sang, and songwriters wrote songs, as if each were a specialist. Today many singers don’t rely on songwriters for their hits; that is not unique to any period of music history. Some artists are performers only and others are on the other end of the creative process as writers, arrangers, producers, and vocalists as well. There were the exceptions, of course, those who were multitalented, such as Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Johnny Cash, just three examples of stars who wrote their own material as well as performed it. But the Beatles, probably more than any other musical act, advanced the idea that a group could be a self-contained unit and record its own songs rather than rely on outside writers—much to the dismay of veteran tunesmiths and lyricists. However, on Nashville’s Music Row, song-penning factories similar to Manhattan’s old Brill Building still flourished.
Even the recording of the album itself fell short of what I had envisioned. I’d expected that the sessions would be crackling with energy and ideas, like what I’d seen in documentary clips of Elvis Presley. He would jam with his band in the studio for days on end, going over and over the same tune until everything felt just right, then cut the track. Same thing with the Beatles. Some of what they went into the studio with were songs they were regularly playing live already, but much was also worked out in the studio, experimenting with blends, sounds, grooves; many classic ideas were discovered by the live jamming itself, allowing room for the magic to unfold in its own time. This was what my perception of making a record was.
Recording my debut felt more like knocking out commercial jingles than record making. Given the limited budget, we zipped in and out of Harold Shedd’s Music Mill studio in a few three-hour sessions, and that was it. Game over. The recording process was fast and efficient. The session musicians, to their credit, were quick to learn their parts, professional and slick, but they were booked tight, and so everyone’s eyes were on the clock, with no time to play around. There was little room to experiment with musical parts or arrangements, as that would have interfered with the assembly-line approach.
As for me, I was afforded little artistic input. During playbacks, the engineers would ask me, “You happy, Eilleen?” “How d’ya like it?” and I’d just nod, because it seemed pretty clear my opinion wouldn’t change anything had I been candid and said that I wanted to try something different or even that I liked it but wanted to work on it some more. The budget drove the limit on our time in the studio, and the engineer’s and producer’s jobs were to stay within budget. It was pretty much like a waiter asking if you’re finished with your meal after he’s already cleared the plates. Still hungry or not, you’re done as far as he’s concerned. Overall, my fantasy of what the recording process would be was not to be. Nevertheless, we were recording in the Music Mill, where countless gold and platinum records had been recorded over the years and that, along with the friendly, warm studio gang of engineers and technicians, kept some of the magic alive for me.
When I arrived in Nashville, I was firm and bold about my creative ideas and career vision. It didn’t take long, however, before I was warned that I’d better learn to keep such thoughts to myself. I have never been a complainer, but as my frustration grew throughout the recording process, I began to share my discontent over some of the material and explained that I was feeling trapped and disheartened by the rigid system of recording. I missed jamming with other musicians and just playing music. I felt that I was being treated like I was just some silly but decent-looking girl from the North who could sing pretty well, and here they were giving me my shot, and therefore I needed to shut up and do what I was told. I
was disillusioned in thinking that I, as the artist, was supposed to be part of making the record, not just doing the vocals. I wanted to be involved, not only come in, sing my part, and leave the rest to the producers and engineers.
I was passionate about music but also pragmatic. When you are starting out, you usually don’t have much choice. I wisely tempered my attitude to avoid being viewed as a troublemaker and being dropped from the label before my record even came out in the spring of 1993. My attitude was to view this as the first step of a long journey. If I played my cards right, I’d get another opportunity to make a record that was more artistically satisfying to me. So for as long as I could without getting myself in trouble, I kept my disappointment, and my opinions, to myself.
16
Go Home, Small-Town Girl
As with many women who work in a man’s world, such as the music industry, I’ve had no shortage of men trying to take advantage of me over the years. Throughout the time I was playing bars in Canada, I was usually the only girl in my immediate company of musicians, technicians, agents, and bar owners. Deerhurst Resort had a more balanced ratio of girls to guys because of the female dancers. Of course, as I learned the hard way there, working with other women can subject you to jealousy, cattiness, and drama, with the added dynamic of PMS, which men just don’t bring to the scene. I learned to be the female minority among men from early adolescence and might have been more prepared for the male-dominated environment of Nashville than were some female artists.
With the frustration of having to bite my tongue rather often during the onset of my recording career, I had to talk myself out of losing my cool (Keep your shirt on, Eilleen), all the while trying to contend with guys trying to take my shirt off. My pants, too, for that matter. Cripes! I’ll give you an example: