Review: Staci Griesbach Takes Up The Challenge To Jazz Up the Songs of Shania Twain

I should preface this review with a caveat; I don't like the music of Shania Twain. This isn't the kind of dislike I feel for “Random Bro Country Person.” This is a level of dislike reserved for few. I consider she and Toby Keith to be the Exhibits A and B for the downfall of country music into pop schlock. Twain and producer Mutt Lange, who had long since abandoned the grit of Back in Black for the lite rock croons of Bryan Adams, Michael Bolton, and Def Leppard created one of the best-selling country albums of all time by not creating a country album by any reasonable definition of the word. The result was a twangy Canadian Michael Bolton. It made a lot of money. Like a LOT of money. But it wasn't for me.

I say all that to both color my commentary to come and to stress just how much Staci Griesbach impressed me with 2019's My Patsy Cline Songbook, featuring jazzy reworkings of one of the queens of country music. The album worked really well and Griesbach's vocals and arrangements were stellar. On the 25th Anniversary of Twain's 1995 breakthrough, Griesbach is taking on a much more daunting challenge with My Shania Twain Songbook. Could her sublime vocals and cast of top notch players actually make Shania Twain listenable? The answer is “kind of.”

Where My Shania Twain Songbook works, it works on a level approaching her Patsy Cline covers. Unsurprisingly, these come with some of the less-known songs from Twain's catalog. The album's unrivaled highlight is album opener “No One Needs to Know Right Now.” Griesbach transforms the song into a Western swing toe tapper in the vein of Hot Club of Cowtown or Asleep at the Wheel. I'm not as familiar with this song as some of Twain's other played to death singles, so I was able to take it at face value more easily. But I think, save one, any of Twain's songs could have been at least somewhat salvaged by the arrangement. For a singer most comfortable in jazz, Griesbach handles Western swing well and, if she decided to dedicate her next Songbook to Rose Maddox or Hot Club of Cowtown, I wouldn't complain.

On more familiar footing for Griesbach is the ballad “Is There Life After Love?” What was a hollow romantic bit of candy floss in the hands of Twain becomes a mournful smoky jazz number that one could imagine being sung by the femme fatale in a Humphrey Bogart film. “God Bless The Child” also finds a total makeover, finding a Billie Holiday groove that actually fits the song better than its original arrangement.

That's not to say there aren't misses on My Shania Twain Songbook. For there not to be would provide Griesbach enough miracles to warrant canonization in the church of country music. As expected, the misses are Twain's biggest hits, the songs that are seared, for better or worse, in everyone's brain. “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under” gets an upbeat '20s flapper jazz skin. It's not bad. You can more or less remove yourself from the source material and enjoy Griesbach's vocals. It just isn't as memorable as other songs.

Then there's the undeniable miss, the song I find myself skipping on each listen after the first couple. It was a cover that had to happen when Griesbach decided to take on Shania Twain, but it was almost always certainly going to be the sinkhole that no one climb out of; “Any Man of Mine.” The faux “girl-power” teeny bopper that somehow managed to reinforce every negative stereotype men have of women (not a surprise since it was primarily written by the decidedly not-female Lange), and was so thoroughly surpassed the next year by The Spice Girls' true girl-power anthem “Wanna Be”, contains no discernible redeeming value. Griesbach gives it her all. She really does. As good as her vocals are and a strong as the horn section behind her is, it just doesn't work. In the end, the entire storage warehouse at Avon doesn't have enough lipstick to put on that musical pig.

While My Shania Twain Songbook contains some misses and is a pretty significant step backward from her collection of Cline songs, there's still enough good here to recommend a buy. Griesbach's “all-in” attitude and a cast of players that include fiddle god Stuart Duncan and Wrecking Crew upright bassist Chuck Berghofer gives it a charm that's hard not to enjoy, if only for the sheer audacity of the thing.

My Shania Twain Songbook is out now and can be ordered from Amazon and other online outlets (though not yet on Bandcamp so keep an eye out for it when it hits that platform if you want to maximize the artist's cut).