Songoftheday 10/16/21 - No inhibitions make no conditions get a little outta line, I ain't gonna act politically correct I only wanna have a good time...

 

 

"Man! I Feel Like A Woman!" - Shania Twain

from the album Come On Over (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #23 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 10

 

Today's song comes from country music singer Shania Twain, whose crossover album Come On Over had already spun off five top-40 pop hits with "Love Gets Me Every Time", "Don't Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)", "You're Still The One", "From This Moment On", and "That Don't Impress Me Much", along with another song that topped the country radio chart in "Honey I'm Home".  The seventh single promoted to country radio would be the brassy and exclamation-prone "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!". Written by Shania with producer/then-husband Robert "Mutt" Lange, the song, which basically builds on the pun in the title, is all about a girls' night out party time. Of course there's nothing truly sinworthy beyond "Color my hair, do what I dare" and "We don't need romance, we only wanna dance", but with the Def Leppard-style production behind her it sure feels like it might be. Beyond that there's nary a mention of the men. Meanwhile, the music video is almost tailored to women (and gay men), with Shania recreating Robert Palmer's iconic "Addicted To Love" clip from the 80's except with vapid male models behind her for eye candy. The result, which really skirted the line between crossover country and pure pop music, got a universally warm reaction from both markets...

"Man! I Feel Like A Woman!" first hit the Country Singles chart big in the spring of 1999, reaching the #4 n June, but it wasn't until it's second run on pop radio that it peaked in the Hot 100 Top-40 in November of that year (in between the single "She's Got A Way" was promoted, I'll get to that). The song also made the top 20 on both the older-skewing Adult Contemporary (#16) and Adult Top-40 (#12) radio format charts. Internationally, the single topped the chart in New Zealand for a week, while making the top ten in the UK (#3), France (#3), Australia (#4), Belgium (#7W/#16F), Ireland (#8), and the Netherlands (#10), while peaking at #17 in Shania's native Canada. At the Grammy Awards in 2000, "Man!.." won the trophy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance (her second in a row). 

As I mentioned, after the run of "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!" on country radio, Twain promoted "You've Got A Way" as the next single, which made it to #13 on Billboard magazine's Country Singles chart while stopping at the halfway mark at #49 on the pop Hot 100 in August of 1999. Also appearing in the romantic comedy movie Notting Hill, the song also spent a half year on the Adult Contemporary format list, cresting at #6, and made the top 40 in both Canada (#17), New Zealand (#17) and Australia (#28). It was nominated at the 2000 Grammy Awards for Song Of The Year, losing out naturally to Santana and Rob Thomas' "Smooth". The ninth song from the set radio took to was the beach-style title cut "Come On Over", which got to #6 on the Country Singles chart and #58 on the Hot 100 in last months of the year. At the 2000 Grammys, Shania took home the Best Country Song award for "Come On Over". That was followed by the totally Def Leppard-y "Rock This Country", which rose to #30 on the Country Singles chart but surprisingly missed the pop Hot 100 altogether. Finally, the track "I'm Holdin' On To Love (To Save My Life)" climbed to #17 on the Country Singles list, making it the eleventh song out of Come On Over's 16 cuts to make the chart in November of 2000, while "bubbling under" the Hot 100 at #102. That's a showing in three years that's never been duplicated. Shania will be back to the series.

(8/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

First up, I have Shania on her Come On Over tour doing both "Man!" and #1 country hit "Honey, I'm Home"...

Shania performed the song at the Grammy Awards - she went on to win "Best Country Female Vocal" for it...

Here's Shania in 2003 starting her show in Chicago's Up! show with the song....

and finally, fast forward to 2014 with her first residency in Las Vegas....

Up tomorrow: A "black street" singer goes it alone for a preferred woman.