“Honey, I’m Home”
Shania Twain
Written by Robert John “Mutt” Lange and Shania Twain
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
October 31, 1998
Shania Twain earns her eighth and most recent No. 1 country single.
The Road to No. 1
Come On Over produced four No. 1 singles on the country charts, and this is the last one, following “Love Gets Me Every Time,” “You’re Still the One,” and “From This Moment On.”
The No. 1
Upon the release of Come On Over, Shania Twain had identified “Honey, I’m Home” as the song on the album that was written specifically for fans of “Any Man of Mine.”
It serves as an effective sequel to that smash hit, with Twain having found the man that meets her standards, and she’s ensuring that he continues to support her through their marriage.
We get some fun role reversal lines here, as a working woman asks for her husband to “rub my feet, give me something to eat, fix me up my favorite treat.” The chorus leans heavily into that aspect of the song, but the verses are distinctly female, as her stressful day includes a run in her pantyhose and a broken nail, causing her frustration to be so great that it “could be worse than PMS.”
The arrangement is very derivative of “Any Man of Mine,” with the arena rock drums in each verse and the warm fiddle and steel drenching each chorus. It’s really the only song on Come On Over that could be dropped as is on to The Woman in Me and fit perfectly within that earlier album. So her final No. 1 country single is a full circle moment that connects it back to her first No. 1 hit from three years earlier.
The Road From No. 1
Come On Over didn’t produce another No. 1 country hit, but it broke several more records. It became the biggest-selling album by a country artist or by a female artist of any genre. “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and the title track all went top ten; “You’ve Got a Way” and “I’m Holdin’ On to Love (To Save My Life)” went top twenty; and “Rock This Country” went top thirty. Come On Over is still the only album to produce eight top ten hits, ten top twenty hits, and eleven top thirty hits. Because the album lost the Best Country Album Grammy to the Chicks, the singles and songs from the album were eligible for two Grammy cycles, giving Twain a total of nine nominations and four wins from Come On Over. She also won her only competitive CMA Award on the strength of the album and its accompanying tour, becoming the first woman in thirteen years to win Entertainer of the Year, presented by the previous female winner, Reba McEntire.
Her next album, Up!, was her third consecutive diamond-selling album, and produced three top ten country hits: “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!,” Forever and For Always,” and “She’s Not Just a Pretty Face.” “Always” is also her most recent No. 1 single on the AC chart. Following a high-selling Greatest Hits project that produced the top ten Billy Currington duet “Party For Two,” Twain took a long hiatus, eventually resurfacing in the late 2010s with Now, which topped both the pop and country album charts. She recently completed another Vegas residency, and was elected into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame this year.
“Honey, I’m Home” gets a B+.
Every No. 1 Single of the Nineties
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It’s always incredible to me that a major label allowed nearly every track on an album to be released as singles and almost all of them were big hits. I can’t imagine we’ll ever see anything like Come On Over again.
Yep, 12 singles in all, 11 sent to country radio alone. That album was still producing hits worldwide in 2000. By that time, Shania herself was refusing to promote it anymore. I remember her skipping the Grammys and ACMs that year, and being bummed that she finally won on-camera awards at both and wasn’t there to accept them.
It’s so odd to me The Chicks winning meant their songs were ineligible but Twain losing meant hers were. I know they consider The Chicks’ songs to already be winners, but that logic also means Twain’s tracks ere already nominees lol.
It’s an odd rule. I think it goes back to the foul taste left by Paul Simon winning Record of the Year for the “Graceland” single the year after the album won Album of the Year. It’s genre-specific, so the Chicks were still eligible for the Record of the Year Grammy for something off WOS. If memory serves, they moved on to Fly at the following year’s ceremony anyway.
Green Day won Record of the Year for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” the year after American Idiot won Best Rock Album, so they were eligible for the general categories, where AI lost Album of the Year, but not the Rock categories, where it won.
Lol so they changed the rule due to Simon, but what happened with him could still happen anyway? Funny. (Alanis won Album of the Year but then “Ironic” was nominated for Record the next year.)
I might have mixed it up in my head. I remember the backlash to the win and assumed that was when they made the change, but “Ironic” would contradict that. It was also really messy before they introduced Best Country/Rock/Pop album, because singles sometimes competed with albums for Best Male/Female/Duo vocal performance. I know for sure that the year Dwight Yoakam won, perennial winner Vince Gill had won for an album the year before and wasn’t able to submit the singles from that album the next year.
“Honey, I’m Home” was the first time I felt like I actually started to get what everyone else had seemingly already figured out about Shania Twain. I finally felt like I could relax, close my mouth, and smile. I could just enjoy her music. Typically, late to the party.