Country dames go pop

We are all familiar with the tale of the Country Mouse who couldn’t live in the city and of his cousin the City Mouse who couldn’t stay in the country. Many years later in the era of the ’70s, the brother and sister tandem of Donny and Marie Osmond tried to be a little bit of both, describing themselves as "a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll." Times have now changed. Singing country belles are not only a little bit of both. They now cross over from one side to another and are now country and rock and R&B and pop plus everything else.

Shania Twain and Faith Hill are two country beauties who took their music by the horns and made magic in the hit charts. They are known as the biggest crossover queens in pop music history. Their early influences were Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton but cleverly arranged tunes in the albums Breathe for Faith and Come on Over for Shania took them out of the country box and turned them into glamorous pop stars with number one sellers. Country purists howled their objections over what they perceived as treason on the part of these cowgirls. But who’s to argue with success?

Years later Shania and Faith continue to reign. In fact both came up with new releases only five weeks apart late in 2002, Cry for Faith and Up! for Shania. Both were among the most awaited products of the year. Fans and to a greater degree music industry bigwigs were eager to find out if the girls would be able to duplicate their earlier feats. They did. Both albums reached number one. Will there be something as intensely affecting as Breathe or There Were You for Faith? Has Shania done tunes as perkily likeable as Come on Over or That Don’t Impress Me Much? They have and done much more besides.

Truth to tell, Shania goes way, way out of her way to please everybody. Up!, where a lot of the titles have an exclamation point, comes in two versions. The package has a red CD and a blue CD. They contain the same songs but the red CD is pop-rock, while the blue CD is Asian-influenced R&B. It is like getting two different albums by Shania and she does show that she can be pop, rock or R&B with ease. And just in case, the purists let out a holler, Shania also has a country version of Up! This one is called the green CD. The US version of Up! has a red CD and a green CD. Asia gets it red and blue but if you also want to listen to the green CD, it can be downloaded free from Shania’s website. Given this fact, it can be rightly said that enjoying Up! really depends on the mood you’re in.

Although she is a country music star from the ’90s, Shania comes off best with the mix ’70s europop and power-rock in the red CD. Think Meat Loaf and Bon Jovi mixed with Abba. Up! with all its lush overdubs is the best example of this new concoction. Another one is the engaging C’est La Vie with the most commercial hook. And if you really want a rock fest, there are Waiter! Bring Me Water! and Nah! All of the songs in Up! were also composed by Shania with her husband and co-producer R.J. Lange.

While Shania teetered among several music types, Faith Hill’s Cry is an honest-to-goodness pop album and with a lot of soul at that. It is a risky undertaking. Her country market might see it as a form of treachery. "How dare she do this, just because she now endorses Cover Girl!" The kids who bought Breathe might find the songs "too old." And the R&B crowd might wonder about what is this white girl from the country trying to do with those ballads.

Sing, that’s what. It is such a relief to find an album by a female pop star without a surfeit of curls, trills or other vocal embellishments. It is true that the purity of her tones and the forthright delivery hark back to the old days. But I also like to think that it is taking us to the future where ballads speak with words and music and not vocal acrobatics. Best of the lot are Cry, If This is the End, Free and Beautiful.