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I’ve been a “summer person” my entire life (what can I say? I’m a Cancer who thrives when crying softly in a body of water), but the chasm between how I expect summer to be and how it actually is has never felt more acute than this year. I live in Los Angeles, a place where our fine-weather frolicking isn’t confined to just June, July, and August, and yet I find myself complaining about the little details that make summer annoying—sand in my bed! Fruit flies in the kitchen! Ridiculously high energy bills!—instead of merely enjoying it.
Do I just need to get over myself and be grateful for my ordinary-yet-spectacular California life, in which I can eat fresh cherries from a stand off the freeway while watching dolphins play in the water at Point Dume with regularity? Absolutely—but that’s easier said than done. The all-consuming, almost manic joy I used to feel as a kid, when the first days of summer beckoned on the East Coast, is harder to summon now that I’m in my 30s. But when I really want to feel it again, I have a little cheat code: I put on my bathing suit, drive to the nearest public pool—I find that the Highland Park one has the highest proportion of empty towel space and hot dads—and blast Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine” as loud as Spotify will allow.
Today Twain turned 60, and while that makes chronological sense, it doesn’t track for me emotionally: When I’m listening to her music (whether the obvious hits, like “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!”—my personal favorite bop about Butlerian gender performance—or deeper cuts, like “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” from her 1995 album The Woman in Me), the entire world is 23, and we’re all gloriously sun-kissed and limber and ready to line dance our man problems away in the company of our cowboy-hat-clad besties.
I wasn’t a big fan of country as a genre until I moved to Austin in 2021, after which it was off to the races: I can still remember my first time warbling “If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask!” at karaoke, and I enjoyed many an evening drunkenly two-stepping to “That Don’t Impress Me Much” at the White Horse. But what I associate Shania Twain with the most is all the aimless driving I did while I lived in Texas—to Barton Springs or to Veracruz for breakfast tacos, sure, but also to Bastrop to pick up a random Facebook Marketplace TV (it didn’t work), or to the Hill Country to drink wine, or even all the way to San Antonio for banh mi at Singhs. Truly, if there’s a better soundtrack to speeding down the I-35 with the wind in your hair and the sun on your face than twangy, sugary, girlypop country, I don’t know her! (Yes, Twain herself is famously Canadian, not Texan, but she’s inarguably altered the Lone Star State’s musical DNA nonetheless.)
Two years into my grand California adventure, I still miss Texas—especially the overwhelming pleasure of early summer there, before it hits 110 degrees in the shade and plastic starts to melt on the sidewalk—but my place in LA does have the objective advantage of being a mere hour and a half away from the Pacific Ocean. Today, in honor of Twain’s birthday and all the gleeful, down-home joy she’s inspired me to take in summer, no matter where I’m living, I will blast “Party for Two” from my Honda Fit at an ear-splitting volume and try to look no further than the moment I’m currently in—the one in which my Spotify is all Shania all the time and my bikini is draped across the bathroom door to dry and nothing has ever tasted sweeter than the late-August peach in my hand.
