Come on Over

iTunes Review

Is Shania Twain’s Come On Over (1997) a country or a pop album? Critics gravely mulled this issue over a decade ago — for most music fans, though, it was a meaningless question. After the enormous success of The Woman In Me, Twain and producer/husband Robert “Mutt” Lange were free to throw aside any restraining Nashville conventions and rock as hard as they cared to. But crunching guitar riffs and slamming drums aren’t the whole story here. Lyrically, tracks like “Honey, I’m Home” and “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” celebrate the lives of hard-working (and hard-partying) Middle American young women — and do it with more wit and style than most country hits manage. The cheeky “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and the winsome “You’re Still The One” present Shania’s tough and tender sides equally well. Tracks like “Black Eyes, Blue Tears” and “If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask” touch upon themes of female empowerment, and Twain sings it all with genuine zest and seductiveness. If she and Lange are following a formula here, it’s very much their own creation.