As "Man! I Like a Woman!" reaches its 25th birthday, Shania Twain took to VEVO to explain the process of making the song, along with her thoughts and feelings about the record. The iconic singer-songwriter explained the track's importance not only to her, but culture at large.
The track, released off of Twain's album, Come on Over, won Twain the award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance at the 42nd Grammy Awards. She also earned the Best Country Song title that same year for the song, "Come on Over."
Twain explained that she wanted to make more than country music, and that "Man! I Feel Like a Woman" was "pushing [her] genre boundaries. Musically [the song] was not limited to one genre. It's rock, it's pop, it's country."
Twain worked alongside her then-husband Mutt Lange, one of her producers, to create the song. Lange was playing around with a guitar riff, paused, and Twain said, "Man, I feel like a woman!" The rest was history.
"When that statement came out of my mouth, it was so obvious that the song was going to be about liberation, independence, and the human spirit," said Twain.
"Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" is a tale of female empowerment, lifting up women with its tongue-in-cheek quips at the patriarchy. Twain described the track as feeling "anthemic right off the bat."
The song features lyrics like, "Oh-oh-oh, I wanna be free, yeah/To feel the way I feel/Man, I feel like a woman," emphasizing the liberation that rests at its core. "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" focuses on the interior and exterior of womanhood. She sings about clothes, partying, and the specific freedom that comes with embracing womanhood as something to be treasured. One need not be a man to have fun.
The music video shows Twain dressed in a top hat, a button-up shirt and tie with a netted veil covering the top half of her face and a black dress underneath. Throughout the video, she removes her more masculine clothing to reveal the black dress underneath. Behind her are male guitarists, all dressed in matching tight long sleeve shirts -- the focus is all on Twain.
She described this as a "role reversal" as it was "important to have the guys be really sexy and androgynous" in order to execute Twain's vision of making "something unexpected."
Twain explained that as she removes her clothes in the video, she's peeling away not only layers of clothes, but layers of a person to reveal a "different side of [her] self."
She revealed that she wanted to "show and say so much more than just man and woman," exclaiming that "there's a whole area in between!" Though she was challenged by the art department-and the country industry at large-Twain stood by her video.
She concluded that "Man! I Feel Like a Woman" is more than just her own song: "It's everyone's song and they all take ownership of it in a different way."
