It's getting dark and it's starting to rain.  I'm not sure where I'm going.  Representatives of the Shania Twain orginization are taking me to a photoshoot in Switzerland, but the process of getting there seems needlessly, twistingly...elaborate.  A taxi picks me up at a hotel accross the border from France.  We curve along the road between the Alps and Lake Geneva, we passed by the dungeon castle that inspired Lord Byron to write "The Prisoner of Chillon." ("My very chains and I grew friends....")  A cell phone rings and the taxi stops at a gas station.  We get out.  We jump into a Mercedes.  The new driver's name is Charles.  Charles takes us through a few Swiss shopping districts-miniature Euro-chic versions of Fifth Avenue.  The cell phone again.  We pull over to the side of the road.  We hop out.  We get into another Mercedes, this one carrying Richard Beck, the 30-year-old Brit who is mapping out Shania's promotional launch in Europe.  "We're going to swap cars again," he laughs.  "It's like a spy movie."  Actually, I'm thinking of Al Pacino at the beginning of The Insider, with the sack over his head.  

 

Okay, it's not uncommon for a journalist to fly in a subtle web of misdirection when pursuing one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, but this is wiggy.  Maybe wigginess comes with the territory when the stars last album sold 34 million copies.  After more than an hour of driving and swapping, we kill another couple of hours in a sleepy, too bright Italian restaurant.  Then the signal finally comes and George, the new driver, takes up into the hills and up to an electronic gate.

 

So where are we after that game of logistical hopscotch?  Through the rain and the mist and the darkness I can make out a modern building with what seem to by skylights.  I'm ushered through a door, down steps, into a white, cool, cylindrical, wine cellar lit by globed Asian lanterns.

 

There she is, Shania Twain, postnatally toned and slim at 37, posing in stoletto-heeled boots and a tight Army-Navy style pants for a photographer.  She's singing along to a Pink song--"All you have to change/Is everything you are."  Her face is a mask of efficiencey.

 

Okay, where are we again?

 

"A school," someone tells me.

 

"A vinyard," says another.

 

But where's the wine?  And what's with all the instruments stacked against the wall?  Drum kits, guitars, enough banks of keyboards to equip a Kraftwerk reunion...

 

"Props," says Beck.

 

"You're dealing with serious insects," Shania tells me the next day.  "You're dealing with mosquito swarms and blackflies, which are just treacherous.  When they bite you, you bleed.  And a lot bite you.  You get swarms of them.  It's really, really hard to work with that.  You're just bleeding.  You're just wet.  You don't want to be outside during blackfly season." 

 

She is framed by a pink and green trompe l'oiel wall, taking tiny sips from a cup of mint tea.  We're in a hushed, elegant restaurant not far from Chateau de Sully, the 19th century mansion in Switzerland's La Tour-de-Peliz that she shares with her producer and husband of eight years, Robert John "Mutt" Lange, and their 1-year-old son, Eja.  Lake Geneva, also known as Lac Leman, laps softly outside.  Amid all this Jamesian gentility Shania is talking about a job she had a long time ago, working with a reforestation crew back home in Timmins, Ontario, Canada.  Plugging thousands of saplings into the ground.  Swatting bugs.  Watching out for bears and bull moose--yeah, a moose can charge and trample you if it's rutting season.  She sighs longingly, as if to say, those were the days... "Yeah, I miss that," she says.  "I miss the simplicity of that job.  It was a great page in my life, actually."  She dabs her eyes with a tissue.  Allergies.  Barbara Walters, beforewarned: You're not going to make Shania cry. 

 

Her new album, due Nov. 19, is called Up!  Previous titles didn't really lend themselves to analysis (The Woman In Me and Come On Over), but the word UP! works pretty well if you're looking for a summation of Shania's personal philosophy.  Whether the subject is pregnancy or creative gestation or youthful adventures in the service sectore, her remembrances are peppy, rosy, free of pain, or victimization.  "My worst day at McDonald's?  I never really had a bad day,"  she says.  "I enjoyed working at McDonald's."

 

This is how everyone, including Shania Twain, describes Shania Twain.  Responsible.  Laser-focused.  A perfectionist.  "A consumate professional," says Paul Boyd, a Scotsman who's directed five of her videos.  Maybe also a tad impenetrable?  "Oh yeah, definately, I agree with that," Boyd says.  "She's very private, and that definately has seeped into her work.  She's a serious person.  There's nothing flippant about her.  It's easy to work with her; she's just not that easy to read.  She's an enigma."

 

Maybe it's natural to think of Shania's remoteless as a coping mechanism--a wise move for a private person in a business that's all about devouring privacy, an understandable phsycological strategy when your early years handed you a steady stream of blackflies and bad news.  Her life story has been repeated so many times that it's become almost a kind of folklore, but that doesn't make it any less moving.  She grew up in Timmins, so poor that she had to pack mustard sandwiches for lunch.  She was 22 when she lost her mother, Sharon, and her step-father, Jerry Twain, in a gruesome collision with a logging truck.  The accident made her "hard," she has said over the years, and "strong," and "numb."  She spent her early 20s caring for her three younger siblings.  Her first shot at breaking into show business invloved wearing fishnets and singing oldies as part of a cheesed-out, big-haired revue in a gray, permafrosted patch of northern Ontario.  It's this saga, this up-from-the-ashes triumph, that gives Shania an almost saintly glow in the eyes of her fans.

 

She'll tell you, though, that she was always a bit of a machine, even before the accident, even in her childhood. "I couldn't be thinking about playing.  I couldn't be thinking about silly things like that," she remembers.  "If I wasn't focusing on my family I was focusing on music.  I took my music very seriously.  It was my outlet, it was my drug.  Through my teens I didn't need drugs or anything like that.  I had music."  However you might feel about Hank Williams and Gram Parsons and the whole honky-tonk tradition of romantic self-sabotage, Shania Twain seems to have let that flaming cup of moonshine pass her by.  "I've never had a drinking problem and never drank when I worked," she says.  "I mean, all my teenage years in bars, I never took a drink.  I certainly could've gone off track many, many times in my youth.  I just wasn't interested."

 

Even her courtship with Mutt started out as business.  In 1993, having mastered the science of the fist-pumping, lighter flicking anthem with the likes of AC/DC, Bryan Adams, and Def Leppard, the South Africa-born and London-bred songwriter-producer was on the prowl for a rising star in Nashville.  He caught "What Made You Say That"--the first video from her dead-in-the-water debut album, 1993's Shania Twain--and called her out of the blue.  Shania didn't know who he was.  She wasn't sure what the name Concorde was, either, but...hell, the whole thing was like a lyric from some Def Leppard riff fantasia: "He bought her a one-way ticket, and baby rode a supersonic jet..."

 

Sort of.  This was Shania's first trip to Europe, but she didn't waste any time watching soldiers march around Buckingham Palace.  "I didn't get a chance to see Europe," she says.  "I wanted to write.  At the time I didn't even know Mutt.  I wasn't taken by him in any way.  It was just, This is a guy who's interested in my songwriting, and he's really into my voice.  We wrote till three or four in the morning.  We were just writing the whole time.  Really productive."  Six monthes later they got married.