Shania Twain is opening up about a 20-year health battle that almost permanently impacted her iconic singing voice and even led to on stage blackouts. The “You’re Still The One” hitmaker, 56, continues to garner attention on social media after detailing two traumatic experiences in her new Netflix documentary, Not Just A Girl: contracting Lyme disease and her divorce from Robert “Mutt” Lange, her longtime partner, producer and fellow songwriter.
In the doc, Twain recalls a moment in 2003 in which she went for a horseback ride (and contracted the tick-provided disease in the process) just before she was to go on tour to support her album Come On Over. “The tick was infected with Lyme disease, and I did get Lyme disease,” she said.
“My symptoms were quite scary because before I was diagnosed, I was on stage very dizzy. I was losing my balance, I was afraid I was gonna fall off the stage… I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds.”
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Twain, (who at the time was topping the music charts with several hits and breaking records in the process), became fearful that her illness might either lead to losing her voice or not sounding like herself. “My voice was never the same again. I thought I’d lost my voice forever. I thought that was it, [and] I would never, ever sing again,” she revealed.
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The “Any Man Of Mine” singer, who lost both of her parents in a car crash in 1987 when she was 22 years old, compared the pain she felt during this tragic moment to that at the end of her marriage. “When I lost Mutt, I guess I thought…I was thinking that the grief of that was… It was similarly intense to losing my parents. And you know, it was like a death,” Twain reflected.
“It was like the death was the end, a permanent end to so many facets of my life. And I never got over my parents’ death. So I’m thinking, ‘Shit, I’m never going to get over this.’ Like…how do you get over that? So all I can do is determine how I’m going to carry on from there. How am I going to crawl out of this hole that I’ve fallen in? Just like that, you know?”
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Ultimately, Twain did find love again several years after her divorce to Lange, but her new beau at the time surprised many fans. In 2011, the “From This Moment On” crooner married Frédéric Thiébaud, the former husband of her best friend Marie-Anne, (who, as a refresher, married Twain’s ex, Lange).
After her divorce, Twain admitted that she found it difficult to step foot in a recording studio and pursue music again without the support of Lange. “It took a long time to be ready to write and record again,” she noted. “It was really more about taking independence, [and] just being able to listen to myself back on my writing tapes was difficult…It was an exercise of saying, ‘Okay, look, you can’t just not ever make music again because you don’t have Mutt. You gotta just dive in.’ And I was petrified, I really was.”
Twain did find the strength within herself, and had artistic ideas of her own that she wanted to explore. “So now I said, ‘Okay listen, I’m going to not only get back into the studio without him, I’m going to write all the music alone, and just discover myself again as individual creative, like I’d been all of my youth.’” In 2017, Twain released her fifth studio album Now, which she has since dubbed her “favorite recorded work” she’s ever done.
