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Shania Twain arrives at the Billboard Music Awards at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Sunday, May 18, 2014, in Las Vegas.Twain has lent her voice to an RCMP campaign against family violence.In a 60-second video posted online by the Mounties the singer tells viewers that violence inside the home shouldn't be kept a secret. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Photo by John Shearer/Invision/APThe Associated Press

It's been a while, but country pop queen Shania Twain is set to go on tour for the first time in a decade this June. The Ontario-born singer  announced her Rock This Country tour, which kicks off in Seattle on June 5, today on Good Morning America.  Twain says the 50-date show will be her last:  "This is a very, very important time on the road for me," Twain told Good Morning America. "I just feel like I'm ready to hang my hat up in that regard. I just really want to go out with a bang.  Canadian fans have their chance to see Twain at 13 shows in  Vancouver, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, London, Ont., Hamilton, Ont., Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. 

To get your Shania fix in the meantime, we bring you this profile of the country superstar written by The Globe's Deirdre Kelly in 1995 and a gallery of photos through the years.

Country music, in case you haven't noticed, has changed. Instead of slow twanging gee-tars and hurtin' songs, what you get these days is 'new country,' an up-tempo, pop-oriented sound belted out by young people who score high in the pulchritude department.

Canadian songbird Shania (pronounced Shu-nye-uh) Twain is perhaps a telling example of country's new direction. She's young, she's gorgeous and she's not afraid to mix her genres.

At age 29 (she hits the big 3-0 on Aug. 28), the former resident of Timmins, Ont., (now home of the Shania Twain fan club) is one of country's fastest-rising recording acts.

The Woman in Me, only her second album, has shot to the top of both The Billboard 200 and Billboard's Top Country Albums chart. On Sunday at Canada's Wonderland, where Twain acted as co-host for country station CISS-FM's music day at the park, Twain's label, Mercury, made the surprise announcement that The Woman in Me had reached double-platinum status in Canada as a result of sales in excess of 200,000. Featuring songs written by Twain in collaboration with husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange, the legendary rock-and-pop producer of such diverse acts as AC/DC, The Cars, Def Leppard, Bryan Adams and Michael Bolton, The Woman in Me is also a chart-climber in the United States where it, too, has gone double platinum. Two singles from the album, Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under and Any Man of Mine, get repeated air play on both country and pop stations.

Twain's wide-ranging appeal has a lot to do with Twain herself. Tawny, with full lips, dazzling white teeth and a mane of chestnut hair that she wears in a slight bouffant style, Twain is unmistakably a babe. She knows it, too.

She harnesses her looks to sell her product and she has none other than John and Bo Derek (yes, that Bo Derek) to help her out. Her new album, for instance, features a catalogue of soft-lens shots and her videos portray a pin-up girl come to life.

Twain says she met the Dereks through her manager who, in consultation with Twain, felt she had to steam up her image. The Woman in Me marks the first time the Dereks have involved themselves in a musical enterprise. It's a far cry from Twain's first self-titled album cover, which showed her dressed in skins and furs, perhaps to emphasize her Northern Ontario roots.

That album, released in 1993, didn't make her a household name (it sold only around 40,000 copies), but it was good for a few things. Namely, it helped introduce her to her 46-year-old husband, whom she married 18 months ago after a four-month whirlwind romance. They met initially over the telephone after he heard her album. When he said his name was Mutt she asked if she could call him something else. He refused. So she called him Mr. Mutt out of respect.

(She says she still refuses to call him by his doggy name and instead calls him "Love," nothing else. He, in turn, calls her Woody as a result of a hairstyle that he says made her look like Woody Woodpecker.) Their relationship was built on a mutual interest in writing songs. He initially helped her pen a few tunes during their phone conversations. When they met in Nashville at Mercury's Fan Fair show in 1993 it was love at first sight. He has since helped her hone a new recording style, one that blends pop rhythms and rap syncopations into a melodious country sound. He's also strengthened her songwriting, something they continue to do together at their home in upstate New York.

But though her husband exerts a strong influence over her and image- maker John Derek is notorious for being something of a Svengali, Twain comes across in an interview as nobody's fool.

She insists that she is not the puppet of an aggressive marketing scheme orchestrated by her record label, her manager or whoever and that basically what you see is what you get.

"If you try to be something that you're not in country, people see that," she says, sitting curled up in a big armchair dressed in jeans, white undershirt, black silk bomber and stocking feet. "You can't try to be sexy and make it work. It all has to be natural or people see through it."

Looking natural is something of an art in itself. The illusion is often the result of years of practice. For Twain, the dress rehearsal started early.

She was eight, she says, when she started her singing career. The daughter of an Ojibway father and an English mother, Twain, the second of five children who were raised partly in the Canadian bush, was used to being hauled out of bed by her country-music-loving parents to sing in local bars after curfew. She played guitar and loved to sing, learning much of what she heard on the radio. Everyone from The Carpenters to The Bee Gees to Dolly Parton to Linda Ronstadt counted as influences.

When she was 21, Twain's parents were killed in a car accident, leaving her to take care of her three younger siblings, then aged 19, 14 and 13. She took a job as a member of the entertainment staff at Deerhurst Inn, an upscale resort north of Toronto near Muskoka, to help make ends meet. Her birth name was Eileen Twain but a few years ago she adopted the name Shania (Ojibway for "on my way") from "a wardrobe girl" at Deerhurst.

"I thought she had the prettiest name and when I asked her what it meant and she told me it was Ojibway I couldn't believe it. I took it because I wanted something unique and something beautiful for myself and also, since my dad wasn't alive anymore, I felt it would somehow keep me connected to him."

Twain shies away from calling herself ambitious.

"I think 'enthusiastic' is a better word," she says. "I'm just very enthusiastic about what I do and into what I'm doing. I'm an active kind of person and I like to do things. If I didn't become a star that wouldn't bother me."

Stardom is elusive, she adds. You can have talent and still not make it to the top or you can do what she does, which is to concentrate on having a good package that appeals to a wide range of people.

"I don't think I'm sensational at anything," she says. "I'm good at what I do. I don't have a great voice. I mean, I'm no Mariah Carey. . . . But I think I'm always improving. And I'm lucky. Which helps."

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