Shania Twain – Forever And For Always

Prince recorded this song. His version has never been released, and almost nobody knew it existed.

Somewhere in Prince’s vault there is a recording of this song that no one outside his circle has ever heard. Shania Twain kept that to herself for years and only mentioned it on December 6, 2019, opening night of her Las Vegas residency, when she stopped before performing it and told the audience she thought of it as her “purple song.” A very dear friend had recorded it, she said. He had been a fan of hers. She was putting the song back into her show for him. Prince had died three and a half years earlier and his version remains unreleased.

Keep watching: Shania Twain – You’re Still the One (Live)

She had not performed it live in more than fifteen years at that point, which is a strange fate for one of the biggest records of her career. Mercury Nashville released it on April 7, 2003 as the fourth single from Up!, written with her husband Robert John “Mutt” Lange and produced by him. It went to No.4 on Hot Country Singles & Tracks, No.20 on the Hot 100, and all the way to No.1 on Adult Contemporary. Reviewers at the time reached immediately for the comparison to You’re Still the One, which was fair — both are Lange and Twain writing a marriage as something durable rather than dramatic, five years apart, before the marriage ended.

The awards followed. A Grammy nomination for Best Country Song in 2004. Song of the Year at both the BMI Country Songwriter Awards and the European BMI Awards the same year. Female Video of the Year at the 2004 CMT Flameworthy Awards. It was also nominated for Video of the Year at the 2003 Canadian Country Music Awards and lost to another Shania Twain video, which is a specific kind of good year.

Why this video is red

Up! was not one album. It shipped as three discs of the same nineteen songs in different arrangements — red for pop, green for country, and blue recorded with Indian musicians in the style of film music from Mumbai. Buyers chose the version they wanted, and Lange built each one as a separate production rather than a remix.

The videos followed the same logic. Forever and for Always exists in a red version and a green version, with an “all performance” edit of each, and a blue version released internationally. The footage on this page is the red version — the pop mix. It is the same shoot with a different soundtrack underneath it, which means anyone comparing two uploads of this video and finding they sound different is not imagining things.

Paul Boyd directed all of it at Bethells Beach on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island in March 2003, shooting Twain’s “When You Kiss Me” video in the same country around the same time. It premiered on CMT on April 26, 2003. The concept is simple and does the job: two children on a beach, the same couple as teenagers, the same couple as old people, with Twain performing on the sand between the scenes. She has said the idea of people who meet as children and are still together decades later moves her, and that being able to make that visible is why she enjoyed the shoot.

The end of an era nobody announced

Up! was the last album Mutt Lange produced for his wife. They divorced in 2008, and she did not release another studio record until Now in 2017 — a fourteen-year gap during which she lost her singing voice to dysphonia and had to rebuild it. That makes this single a closing document without meaning to be: the last of the Lange-produced ballads about permanence, cut in Nassau and Milan and Dublin by a couple whose partnership had five years left.

The Prince recording is the detail that keeps this song interesting, and it is unlikely ever to be resolved. His vault held thousands of hours of unreleased material and its contents emerge slowly and unpredictably. Somewhere in it is a version of a Shania Twain country ballad, recorded by one of the most distinctive musicians of the twentieth century, that exists only because he liked the song.