She's Still The One

SHANIA TWAIN has made it through a painful divorce, self-doubt and a vocal-cord ailment. At 52, she’s back— with her first new record in 15 years and a confident, sunny outlook.

- Courtney Shea

Shania Twain didn’t start out with dreams of becoming a country-pop icon. Growing up in Tim-mins, Ont., in the 1960s and ’70s, she faced poverty and family dysfunction; as a kid, she sang in local bars to make ends meet. It wasn’t until the mid’90s—with the help of Robert “Mutt” Lange, an influential pop and rock producer and her then-husband— that Twain ascended to stardom. Fans were drawn to her plucky attitude and lively brand of female empowerment that put unworthy men on notice in anthems like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” To this day, Twain remains the best-selling female country artist in history, thanks in no small part to the success of her 1997 smash hit, Come On Over, the top-selling country album of all time.

But success had its downsides: in 2000, she and Lange moved to a remote town in Switzerland—an attempt, Twain said at the time, to “leave behind the whole ‘Shania’ thing.” Nearly a decade later, the singer’s professional and domestic lives were thrown into upheaval when she discovered Lange was having an affair with her closest friend. The devastation and stress from this betrayal, she says, factored into her 2010 diagnosis of dysphonia, a disorder of the vocal cords that causes hoarseness; it left Twain unable to sing and deeply uncertain of her future.