Pivotal to Twain's crossover success is her husband and producer, Robert John "Mutt" Lange (for whom Twain wrote last year's smash single "You're Still the One").
A rock and roll veteran who has produced multiplatinum albums by Bryan Adams, Def Leppard and Michael Bolton, the South African Lange, 50, first spotted Twain in 1993 while watching one of her early videos. Smitten, he called her in Nashville from his London home, and the pair spent the next three months writing songs over the phone. By then the twice-divorced Lange was determined to stay single, but Twain turned him around. "I had never seen Mutt like that before," says Bolton. "He was as focused on Shania as he was on his work. He just had an instinct that she was it for him." The instinct was mutual. Recalls Twain's sister Carrie-Ann Brown, 31, who lives in Huntsville, Ont.: "She said to me, 'He's the one.' There wasn't a question in her mind from the beginning."
The couple, who married in December 1993, nine months after that first phone call, are rarely seen together. Lange is notoriously publicity-shy: In a recent preemptive strike against the press, he bought the rights to nearly every photograph ever taken of him. "He doesn't want to be a celebrity, he just wants to be a producer," says Twain, whose latest collaboration with Lange is the single "You've Got a Way" from the Notting Hill soundtrack. "So he avoids the spotlight. That's why people think he's a recluse." Her demanding touring schedule also keeps the couple out of the camera's way. "We're apart more than we're together," says Twain. "It's very, very difficult. Sometimes I think, in five to 10 years, when I'm not traveling as much, what's it going to be like then. It's that scenario when one or both of a couple retire, and then they don't know what to do with each other. They're together too much." But since Twain and Lange don't have that problem, people speculate. "I get a call every few days from someone who has heard they have broken up," says Mercury Records Nashville president Luke Lewis. "I would be totally shocked if it happened."
"With Shania, I see progress," says June Carter Cash. "She has opened up a lot of space for future female country singers."
