Shania Twain may be one of the biggest country music stars ever. But aside from that, she’s also a fashion icon. Over the years, the country/pop queen has dazzled in plenty of looks that have stood the test of time. Take, for example, her famous leopard print ensemble in her ’90s music video for “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and her denim get-up in the video for “Any Man of Mine.”
But, when it came time to create the cover art for the debut single from her upcoming Queen of Me album, “Waking Up Dreaming,” Twain decided to set aside fashion and explore a more in-depth approach to her artistry.
Twain chose to shoot the promotional artwork for the track almost entirely nude, wearing only accessories that included a cowgirl hat, colorful cowgirl boots, and a satin shirt wrapped around her waist.
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Twain debuted that artwork late last year as a way to spread a message of body positivity. Now, she has revealed that she initially went into that photo shoot feeling a bit timid, using the term “scary” to describe the bare-all moment.
“It was really scary, you know, I don’t really love my body. I don’t love looking at myself in the mirror with the lights on or looking in the mirror at all at my body,” Twain, 57, admitted in a brand-new interview with TODAY Show’s Hoda Kotb. “So I said, listen. I’m going to face that fear. I’m going to go into that photo shoot, and I’m going to put fashion aside. So fashion, we used to flatter our shapes to hide the things that we don’t like to make us look more like what we wish we really did look like without the clothes. Putting fashion aside, this is me.”
Twain said once she faced her insecurities head-on, she had no regrets and only felt a sense of empowerment.
“It was so empowering. I’m so glad I did it,” Twain said of the topless photo shoot. “I was petrified! But once I flipped that switch and dove into it, I committed 100%. I wasn’t thinking about what anybody thought. I didn’t think about who was in the room. This is about me. This is my moment to really embrace myself in vulnerable moments.”
“It had to be vulnerable, where I felt that I was facing a fear of being judged, or maybe even laughed at, at being embarrassed,” she added. “But it was only empowering. It was really fabulous.”
Now that she has publicly conquered her fears of baring it all for the sake of spreading awareness to love oneself, Twain can’t help but reflect on her younger years. As a teenager, she says she used to overthink how she looked when she would go to the beach in her swimsuit. Now she looks back on those days with a realization that she shouldn’t have been so worried about her image.
“As we age and as our skin starts to melt, and all kinds of things happen to us, I’ve realized that, wow, I was shy about wearing a bikini at the beach when I was younger, and I’m thinking, ‘That was ridiculous! I’ve got to stop this nonsense and start wearing a bikini to the beach now even though I’m not my 20-year-old self.’” Twain shared. “You know. I’ve just got to get over that stuff.”
“I am a woman in my late 50s, and I don’t need to hide behind the clothes. I can’t even tell you how good it felt to do the nude shooting,” Twain also noted in a previous interview with PEOPLE. “I was just so unashamed of my new body, you know, as a woman that is well into my menopause. I’m not even emotional about it; I just feel okay about it. It’s really liberating.”
Twain’s partially nude cover art for “Waking Up Dreaming” also happens to reflect the meaning behind her Queen of Me album title.
When asked what the album title means to her, she says: “It means taking responsibility and ownership of yourself and loving who you are. I’m my own royalty. I’m the boss of me, and I’m responsible for the decisions I make for what I say and for what I do. It’s a statement of self-confidence I’ve grown into more over the last few years.”
Twain’s Queen of Me sixth studio album, which also features her recently-released “Giddy Up!” single and marks her first full-length album since 2017’s Now, drops on Feb. 3.