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Country music icon Shania Twain took to social media to congratulate Taylor Swift for breaking a chart record previously held by her.
Swift has broken Twain's record as the female artist with the most weeks at No. 1 on the Top Country Albums chart, which stood at 97.
Shania tweeted:
"Let’s Go Girls!!!! Proud of you @taylorswift13. Historical records are meant to be made and then broken. The baton is meant to be passed on to new generations. Unstoppable young female country artists are 🔥 inspite of the hurdles ✊ #trailblazers"
Taylor Swift and Shania Twain are each other's fans
And the feeling of respect is mutual.
Taylor recently shared her adoration for Shania via a Tiktok video, which she captioned,
"Learned from the best 💁♀️ #mamasaid #swifttok @shaniatwain 📷: ".
The video features a supercut of country music artists who have achieved mainstream pop success. The exchange of admiration between this inter-generational pair has quite some history.
In 2014, Twain said in an interview:
"Taylor’s a singer-songwriter-performer, she does it all, and I think that the world is her oyster, she’s young and she needs to just do whatever she’s having fun at and I think everybody’s loving it."
Despite losing the record for most weeks at number one on the country charts, Shania Twain is synonymous with crossover country music success. Having been dubbed "The Queen of Country Pop", she has sold over 100 million albums worldwide, making her the best-selling female artist in the genre.
After a sensationally successful career in the nineties, Twain entered a hiatus after releasing a Greatest Hits album in 2004, revealing years later that her diagnosis with Lyme disease and dysphonia had led to a severely weakened singing voice.
Swift, on the other hand, is a name synonymous with the present music industry. Her success in both the country and pop genres has scarcely been repeated in the past. She holds a host of records, and just like the aforementioned one, makes (and breaks) new ones regularly.
In addition to two insanely admired lockdown albums in folklore and evermore, Taylor Swift is also in the process of reclaiming the ownership of her previous catalog by re-recording them.
It is uplifting to see artists turn up in support of each other despite the inherently competitive nature of statistical records.
