She might be known as a hugely successful pop-country artist, but Shania Twain says that she’s a “rock chick at heart”, and was singing Def Leppard songs in bars long before she became famous.
Twain and Def Leppard have something significant in common, of course: their biggest albums were produced by Mutt Lange, who Twain was also married to between 1993 and 2010. And on hearing Leppard’s 1987 hit Pour Some Sugar On Me on the Track Star podcast, the star was quick to heap praise on her ex-husband’s musical talents.
“The Mutt Lange story is very long,” says Twain. “He's a legend – he created that record many, many years ago, before I met him. But I used to do this song as part of my rock repertoire once I was a little older. I graduated out of, you know, my grandparents' country restaurant music, and then I was doing the folk-rock stuff, and then I started doing Def Leppard. I am a rock chick at heart.”
Pour Some Sugar On Me is taken from 1987’s Hysteria, the third Def Leppard album that Lange produced, and the biggest of their career. He then worked with Twain on three of her smash-hit records, including 1997’s hugely successful Come On Over, which remains one of the best-selling albums of all time.
Asked to explain Lange’s hit-making prowess, Twain says: “Mutt definitely had a signature style of working, and that translated into the records for the most part, in everything.”
She goes on to mention a specific production element that Lange not only liked to focus on, but to be part of.
“Mutt loves all the background vocals,” she says. “On my records, Mutt and I did all the background vocals together, so it was just the two of us, which was still a great sound, but with a band like Def Leppard, it's the band, it's all their voices, it's him in there, and he was almost like the other member.”
Elsewhere in her Track Star episode, Twain offers further evidence of her rock credentials by praising Fleetwood Mac and Pet Benatar. “I think I was 15 when this song came out, and this got me into performing on stage with black tight leggings,” she says of Benatar’s 1980 single Hit Me With Your Best Shot, calling it a “really true rock chick record.”
Conversely, Twain says that she was also learned a lot from listening to The Carpenters: “This music, it was a huge influence on my songwriting and my vocal style – my phrasing, more of the alto tones, definitely – and I kept a lot of the vibrato and a lot of the vocal arranging,” she says. “It was complex and layered… we loved to layer sounds, and The Carpenters did that. They were the masters at it.”
