Shania Twain – Party For Two ft. Billy Currington

She spent her 39th birthday on a London street filming a video about throwing herself a party — and the duet inside it was never supposed to be with Billy Currington.

On August 28, 2004, Shania Twain walked the streets of London’s Mayfair handing out party invitations to strangers — movers, a waiter, a street artist — for a camera crew. It was her 39th birthday, and she was spending it filming a music video about throwing herself a party. Nobody planned the coincidence and almost nobody has ever noticed it, but it suits the record perfectly: Party for Two is three and a half minutes of a woman deciding to have a good time and talking someone else into joining her. The man she talks into it, though, was the second choice — and the story of how he got there is the best kind of Nashville accident.

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Twain wrote the song with her husband and producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange as one of three new tracks for her first Greatest Hits collection, and she described it as picking up where Up! left off. The duet was built for Toby Keith, whose schedule refused to cooperate. Rather than wait, Twain told Mercury Nashville she wanted a partner completely unlike herself, and label president Luke Lewis suggested a barely known singer from Georgia on the company’s own roster: Billy Currington, with exactly one top-ten to his name. For a newcomer, dueting with the best-selling female country artist in history was the definition of a lottery ticket, and Currington later described the sessions as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, saying Twain and Lange put him instantly at ease. The record they cut is a flirtation staged as a negotiation — she invites, he hesitates, she reveals the guest list is exactly two people, he stops hesitating. Twain insisted on keeping it flirty rather than steamy, and the restraint is what makes it work: it winks, it never leers.

One song, two singles

Then Mercury did something very Shania with it. Just as her albums had shipped in country and pop versions, Party for Two was released on September 7, 2004, as two records at once — the country version with Currington for country radio, and a pop version with Sugar Ray frontman Mark McGrath for pop stations and international markets. Two videos were filmed across those two August days in London, Twain’s preparation scenes shared between them while each partner shot his own half of the party, complete with chandelier-swinging and plate-smashing in a grand townhouse. The country clip debuted on CMT on September 27 and was nominated for Collaborative Video of the Year at the 2005 CMT Music Awards; the pop clip took the MuchMoreMusic Video of the Year at Canada’s MuchMusic Video Awards. The Currington version entered the Hot Country Songs chart at No. 39 — Twain’s third-highest debut at country radio ever — and climbed to No. 7, while the parent album opened at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 530,000 copies in a week, held off only by Eminem, and set a Guinness record as the fastest-selling greatest-hits album by a female artist in American history.

The quiet ending nobody saw

What no one knew in 2004 was that the party was the finale. Party for Two became Twain’s sixteenth top-ten hit on the Hot Country Songs chart — and her last, to this day. It was also her final Hot 100 appearance of the decade. Within a few years, Lyme disease had ravaged her voice, her marriage to Lange had collapsed, and the most commercially dominant run any woman ever had in country music simply stopped, mid-stride, with a song about having fun. Currington, the lottery-ticket kid, went on to string together a dozen country No. 1s of his own. And the duet kept its charm intact: when Twain called him onstage at Michigan’s Faster Horses Festival in July 2023, they performed it live together for the first time since a Good Morning America appearance in November 2004 — nineteen years between the first dance and the second, and the invitation still working.