If you can’t get something out of the songs of Shania Twain, you’re a lost cause

Pop critics routinely make the mistake of assuming the most important acts are the ones copied by the groups they like. So to a generation of writers who grew up listening to 1980s and ’90s indie, the Velvet Underground are the second most important group of all time, after the Beatles. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Velvet Underground, and they are hugely important in rock history. But in reality the second most important group in rock history is Van Halen, because for a decade or so the vast majority of hard-rock bands – who in the 1980s were commercially huge – were trying to imitate them in one way or another. Van Halen’s influence dictated what millions of record buyers were actually taking home from the shops, whereas the Velvet Underground’s dictated what 800 people were going to see at ULU on a Friday night.

Shania Twain is country’s Van Halen. The success of her 1997 album Come On Over – the biggest-selling country record ever and the eighth-biggest-selling record by anyone in any genre ever – transformed country music in profound ways. In collaboration with her then husband, the producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, she made a canny record that was not simply country but more akin to expertly assembled pop-rock with some fiddles on top. (They also released an ‘international version’ that removed the country instrumentation.) Lange had previously made superstars out of AC/DC and Def Leppard, and he brought his skills to bear with laser focus, something Twain continues to acknowledge.

Come On Over is the point at which country ceased to be country, where it started to assimilate other genres, and a quarter of a century on, the biggest country records don’t sound the tiniest bit like George Jones.