Shania Twain - Life's About To Get Good

After Serious Illness and Divorce, the Iconic Country Singer Reveals the Struggles Behind Her First Album in 15 Years.
 

It wasn’t getting bitten by a tick and contracting Lyme disease that made Shania Twain question her future. Nor was it the ever-extending delay since her last album: the 20 million selling Up! of fully 15 years ago. It wasn’t even the high-profile divorce from her husband, producer and creative foil, “Mutt” Lange. It was the moment that doctors started sticking needles into her larynx.

The Canadian superstar hasn’t made a record since people still bought CDs by the bucket-load. But after a harrowing few years, her inescapably catchy adult pop– with its occasional nods to the country sound that introduced her–is back.

The self-written Now album is her first since Up! became her third in a row to go “diamond,” for US sales alone of at least 10 million.

Twain and Lange separated in 2008 and divorced two years later, after his affair with her best friend, Marie-Anne Thiebaud. The tabloid field day continued as Shania found comfort in the arms of Thiebaud’s estranged husband, Frederic, whom she married in 2011. All the while, she was raising Eja, her son with Lange, now 16. She performed live, notably in Las Vegas, with no album on the horizon. Twain cheerfully describes that period as a “nightmare”.

We are in a chic London hotel, where she sips water and exudes a conviviality not always to the fore when we met at the time of her British breakthrough. Launched here in 1998, with Come on Over already a North American sensation, she was always polite, but often perfunctory. Now she admits she thought the game might be up when, as a consequence of Lyme disease, she got dysphonia, the inability to use one’s vocal cords normally. Essentially, her voice was shot. A long, exhausting recovery began before she could even think about making an album.