Shania Twain Dishes on How Brad Pitt Inspired ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’
It's nothing personal, Shania Twain says, but when Brad Pitt's nude photos sent the world into a frenzy two decades ago, she just wasn't that impressed. That lack of enthusiasm, though, gave birth to one of her biggest hits, "That Don't Impress Me Much."
One of Twain's late-1990s hits, "That Don't Impress Me Much" -- which was released in December of 1998, 20 years ago -- finds the country star dropping Pitt's name in one of its lines: "Okay, so you're Brad Pitt / That don't impress me much ..." As Twain explains to Billboard, she was inspired to use Pitt's name because of what was, at that time, a major scandal: Playgirl had published naked pictures of the actor and his then-girlfriend, Gwyneth Paltrow, leading Pitt to file a restraining order that forced the magazine to pull the issue.
“I remember I had a girlfriend visiting me, and it was near Christmas, and we were baking cookies," Twain recalls. "I was writing [for my album Come on Over], and there was a scandal of him and Gwyneth, where there was naked photos of him. And this was, like, all the rage. I just thought, 'I don't know what all the fuss is about' ... We see people naked every day."
"That Don't Impress Me Much" climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was a Top 10 hit on the country, adult contemporary and Top 40 charts, and a major hit in numerous other countries.
"I wasn't picking on Brad Pitt. But that was just the association in that moment and things we make fusses about and whatever," Twain adds. "Of course, it could have been any gorgeous guy.”
Twain's Come On Over album is the best-selling country album of all time and the best-selling studio album by a woman of any genre.
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