That Don't Impress Me Much

Built around a magnificent joke and delivered with the timing of someone who's been waiting to use it. The production has a deliberate bounce to it — electric guitar with a quirky melody, a rhythm that ambles rather than drives, space left in the arrangement for Twain's deadpan vocal to land. The lyrics catalog a series of men who believe their particular brand of coolness should be impressive enough — the intellectual, the handsome one, the celebrity — and Twain's narrator dismantles each one with cheerful efficiency. The humor is the point, but underneath it is a genuine statement about desire: that attraction cannot be manufactured through status or performance, that what moves a person is specific and immune to logic. Twain's voice is dry and precise in the verses, just warm enough in the chorus to suggest she's not entirely closed to the idea of being impressed — she just hasn't been yet. This was a peculiar choice for a mainstream radio hit because it's essentially a comedy song, and it worked because the comedy is smart without being mean. It surfaces when someone is rolling their eyes affectionately at the gap between self-presentation and reality, when you want music that is cheerful about disappointment and unimpressed by its own cleverness.