The songstress opens up about how her divorce and health scare both almost ended her career.
In Shania Twain’s new Netflix documentary, Not Just a Girl, the 56-year old songstress gets candid about how dealing with her Lyme disease diagnosis and her husband’s alleged infidelity affected her music.
Following the success of her third studio album, 2002's Up!, and toward the end of her tour, Twain was horseback riding when she got bit by a tick. “I did get Lyme disease. I mean, my symptoms were quite scary, because before I was diagnosed, I was onstage very dizzy,” she shares in the doc.
“I was losing my balance. I was afraid I was gonna fall off the stage and the stage is quite high. So, I was staying far from the edge. I was adjusting what I was doing. I was having these very, very, very, very millisecond blackouts but regularly, like every minute or every 30 seconds,” she adds.
After getting the diagnosis and going through treatment, Twain noticed a change in her voice.
“But my voice was never the same again,” she reveals. “It just went into this strange flanging, lack of control of the air flow, I didn’t understand it.”
She adds, “But I thought I had lost my voice forever. I thought that was it. I thought I would never ever sing again.”
At the same time, Twain unfortunately found out that her husband, Robert “Mutt” Lange was allegedly having an affair with her best friend -- causing her to end her 14-year marriage.
“In that search to determine what was causing this lack of control with my voice and this change in my voice, I was losing my voice,” she says. “I was facing a divorce. My husband leaves me for another woman.”
Twain and Lange were married from 1993-2010. At the time her marriage ended and while she was battling health issues, the GRAMMY-winning singer didn’t think she would continue with her career.
“Now I'm at a whole other low and I just don’t see any point in going on with a music career,” she shares. "When I lost Mutt, I was thinking that the grief of that was similarly intense to losing my parents and it was like a death."
"It was the permanent end to so many facets of my life and I never got over my parents' death so I'm thinking, ‘S**t. I'm never going to get over this,'" she continues.
Twain then turned to the music and it was Lionel Richie’s call to have her on his new album for a duet of “Endless Love” that made her get back in the studio. After initially declining, because she felt her voice wasn't strong enough, she finally decided to take a chance with the musician who put a “kind” pressure on her.
“I thought that if I fail, I’d rather fail with somebody that is forging and sweet and kind about it,” she says about getting in the studio with Richie and recording the song.
“It was a lot of pressure, oh boy, that day was so stressful. So glad that’s over and that ended well. It took me a lot of encouragement from around me to get me truly doing it for real. And Lionel Richie was a big part of that,” she says.
The single sparked a change in the singer's life. Following its release, Twain got back in the studio again. Eventually, she released 2017's Now, which was her first album post-divorce, and her highest-charting debut. That same year, Twain began her Las Vegas residency.
In the midst of finding music again, the singer married her current husband, Frédéric Thiébaud.
Twain's full documentary, Not Just a Girl, is currently streaming on Netflix.
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