‘You can get consumed by negativity. So I’ve got to move on’ – Shania Twain opens up about poverty, betrayal, divorce and why her extraordinary life has left her feeling empowered
When Shania Twain was a teenager, she used to sing Hank Williams’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ and Willie Nelson’s ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ in the bars around Ontario, Canada, to help pay the family bills at their three-room rented home.
he lyrics to those songs were to prove prescient. Despite finding massive success as a country music singer, and building a career that had seen her travel the world, by the age of 40 Twain found herself with plenty to cry about.
She was living in her chateau in La Tour-de-Peilz in Switzerland when she found out her husband and long-time musical collaborator, the legendary producer Mutt Lange, was cheating on her with her best friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud, the woman she hired to run her 46-room mansion on Lake Geneva. Twain was heartbroken.
Fifteen years later, speaking to me by Zoom from Los Angeles as she prepares to release her new album, the five-time Grammy winner is reflecting on that period of her life.
Now 57, Twain has seen it all, and her advice to women who’ve suffered a similar betrayal is simple.
“Don’t focus on the things you can’t change,” she says. “That’s what you have to let go of, more than anything. With the things you cannot change, you are holding on to nothing.
“You’ve got to grab on to the things you can change and nurture those and run with those. That’s really the way I feel. I have to go through the exercise. I’m just like anybody else.”
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Shania Twain will be gigging in Dublin in September 2023
That is not strictly true. Twain is the best-selling female artist in country music history and is worth an estimated $400 million. But despite her huge success she is resolutely grounded – and determined.
“I choose to work through things if they are blocking me. There is no doubt about that. If there is something in my way that’s blocking me, I’m obsessed. I will find a way through it or around it. Or just simply get over it.”
How?
“What worked for me is to recognise it and go: ‘Oh, okay, I recognise that, and now I’m going to get the hell away from that – as far as I can,’” she laughs. “Recognise it, acknowledge it. That’s perfectly fine. There are so many things that can pre-occupy you in a positive way.”
Twain’s life lessons may be hard won, but they have given her plenty of material when it comes to writing her songs. Her sixth album, Queen of Me, was released last week. One of the standout, and most honest, tracks on it is ‘The Hardest Stone’.
“It’s about accepting that you can’t change the heart of someone else,” she says. “You know, if they’re cold, if they’re mean, if they’re ugly, if they’re unkind, it’s not up to you to change them. You’re only in charge of your own heart and your own behaviour. It’s a good lesson in life.”
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Some people, through no fault of their own, repeat things which they thought they had learned from, I say. It is probably human nature.
“I think sometimes those are lessons that we never ever entirely apply, even though we know better, because if you are a trusting person – and you believe in the good in others – you will probably stumble at some point, and more than once in your life, on a dark heart, a heavy one. Someone that you can’t change. That you wish you could, but you just can’t. You’ve got to move on from it.”
Moving on is something Twain has become very familiar with over the years. In an interview in 2011 with Oprah Winfrey she claimed that when she had confided to Marie-Anne that she had suspicions Lange was having an affair, she comforted her and told Shania she was imagining it.
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Shania Twain and her ex-husband Mutt Lange in London’s West End in 2000. Photo: Gareth Davies/Getty
“I believed her and I accepted it as being genuine. I said: ‘Marie-Anne, don’t you think my husband is acting strange?’” Twain told Oprah. “And she said: ‘No, I don’t see anything strange.’”
The day after Lange told Twain he wanted out of their 14 year marriage – but wouldn’t tell her why – she met Marie-Anne’s husband, Frédéric.
He told her Lange and Marie-Anne were having an affair behind their backs.
“Of course I didn’t believe him, and I thought for sure he was making it up,” Shania said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“It was obviously just denial on my part. But he just said: ‘You know I have proof if you want it. I’ve been following it now for a few weeks and I’ve got hotel bills and all kinds of details.’”
In her 2011 memoir, From This Moment On, Twain described her heartache. “For the first week after finding out about the affair, I was ready to die,” she wrote. “To go to bed forever and never wake up. I was disgusted that another woman’s lust for a lifestyle upgrade was worth the devastation of my family.”
Twain added in the book that when Marie-Anne changed her phone number, she wrote her a letter. “I am so low,” it read. “So broken-hearted I can’t take it any more. I wish you love and happiness, but I am dying, and I can’t take it any more. This is killing me. Have mercy. I loved him so much, and I can’t cope any more. I don’t want life or love any more. I just want peace.”
Shania Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards on August 28, 1965 in Windsor, Ontario. Her parents Clarence and Sharon’s marriage ended when she was two years of age. Her father abandoned them, effectively leaving them destitute.
Clarence died a few years ago. Twain says she harboured no ill will towards him.
“I didn’t hold anything against him. There was nothing to mend. I didn’t know him when he left. I suppose I could have resented him for leaving us before we did know him, but I genuinely didn’t hold on to that.”
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Shania Twain performing in Hamburg November 18, 2004. (REUTERS/Christian Charisius)
The family moved in with her grandmother in Timmins, a city in north eastern Ontario, where Sharon married Jerry Twain. Money was hard to come by. It was a struggle to put food on the table and to make ends meet.
Twain would sometimes go to school with nothing to eat – with a fear in the pit of her empty stomach that the authorities would take her into care.
There were five kids in two rooms: Twain and her sisters Jill and Carrie Ann and her step-brothers Mark and Daryll. And there was a relation who they took in and raised him as their own.
“They adopted another child, my aunt’s son,” Twain told me in 2003 when I interviewed her ahead of a sold-out show in Nowlan Park in Kilkenny.
“My aunt committed suicide and the child, my adopted brother, was only six months old. So there’s four fathers in our family.”
Twain started singing at the age of four, and was soon singing old country songs in bars, getting $20 per night, to help pay the bills at home. For the troubled child it was also an excuse to get out of the family home, where her stepfather was sexually abusing her.
At one point she and her siblings and her mother ran away to a homeless shelter in Toronto but eventually returned.
At 10, she was writing her own songs. She performed on the CBC’s The Tommy Hunter Show when she was 13. Five years later she moved to Toronto to pursue her dream of becoming a country music star.
That dream appeared shattered on November 1, 1987, when her mother and stepfather were killed in a head-on collision with a truck on an Ontario highway and Twain had to return home to Timmins to raise her siblings. She was 22.
“That was a girl who was definitely fighting to just get through every day,” Twain says. “It was a day-to-day experience for me at that age. I was ready to let go of my dreams, really.
“Responsibility came first. That was the truth of it. I was just very lucky I was able to get a job,” she says, referring to the gig she got performing cover songs for guests at a local tourist resort.
There are some people who would just fold. I didn’t
That was where she honed her performing skills and it crucially allowed her to support her family.
“It was still in music, but totally not in my normal work in music. But it paid the bills and I was able to keep singing. So, that was a real stroke of luck.”
Where did you find the strength to cope with all that after the deaths of your mother and stepfather? There are some people who would just fold. I didn’t.
“I can’t give myself credit for that. I think some people just have it in them to push through,” she says. “And, unfortunately, for some they just can’t. So I don’t know where that comes from in me.
“I know a lot of people refer to me as someone who must have been very ambitious. But it’s not about ambition at all. It’s about that drive that comes from deciding to not look back and to not look down. Just go! You know, just go and make the most of it that you can.”
In June, 1993, Twain met the famous South Africa-born record producer Lange at Nashville’s Fan Fair. They married later that year in Ontario. It was the start of a golden period in Twain’s career. Lange produced her second album The Woman in Me in 1995 (her first album, 1993’s Shania Twain was a flop).
Shifting over 20 million copies, it went on to become one of the best-selling country albums of all time.
In 1997, Come On Over sold 40 million albums worldwide and featured the singles ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ and ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’. In 1999, she was named the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year.
There was the follow-up album, Up!, in 2002, also produced by Lange. The music industry’s power couple could do no wrong. Everything they touched turned to Grammy gold. They lived with their son, Eja, in their fairy-tale pile in Switzerland.
Then, in early 2008, the fairy tale ended abruptly with the announcement of their separation. It was nothing short of bitter.
In June 2010, they divorced. In December, Shania and Frédéric Thiébaud, Marie-Anne’s former husband, announced their engagement.
On New Year’s Day, 2011, they married in Puerto Rico. In her Netflix documentary, Not Just a Girl, she compared her divorce to the car crash that killed her parents.
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Shania Twain and her husband Frederic Thiebaud are shown on their wedding day in Rincon, Puerto Rico (AP Photo/Sandbox Entertainment)
“It was like a death,” she said. “It was a permanent end to so many facets of my life. It took a long time to be ready to write and record again.”
She also had to contend with the fallout from Lyme disease, which left her unable to sing for a lengthy period.
But in 2017 she finally released the long-awaited Now, her first record in 15 years. The world wanted to know what was on her mind. It was worth the wait.
“I still can’t believe he’d leave me to love her,” she sang on ‘Poor Me’. Then on ‘I’m Alright’, she went further: “You let me go, you had to have her/You told me slow, I died faster.”
My parents’ dying is by far the most devastating, the deepest grief, the greatest loss I have ever experienced
Interviewing Shania in London in 2017 to promote that album was surreal – not least when she introduced me to Frédéric in the hotel afterwards.
I told her that most people would struggle to get their heads around the fact she was now married to the husband of the woman her husband had the affair with.
“I don’t believe it either,” she laughed. “We both can’t believe it still. It’s incredible. It is a beautifully incredible thing that is like a miracle.”
In London, I asked Twain if there was any way she blamed herself, or felt she played a part in her own break-up?
“You do feel that is part of it, for sure. I never thought it was entirely my fault. But I certainly felt that I obviously missed something. ‘Where have I been? Hello? How dumb can one be,’” she laughed. “In the moment, I just felt very stupid.
“I just felt like an idiot. Of course not now. You put things in perspective over time.”
Asked to put her ex-husband’s affair in some sort of overall context that day in London, she said that she “realised what deserved importance… and my parents’ dying is by far the most devastating, the deepest grief, the greatest loss I have ever experienced. I lived through that.”
She added that she started comparing her mother and stepfather’s tragic deaths and her husband’s extramarital affair with the woman she thought was her best friend and in the end, she said, “it empowered me. That was the perspective.”
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Shania Twain pictured at Nowlan Park in Kilkenny. Photo: Dylan Vaughan
Last week I asked Twain if she still believed those experiences had empowered her.
“Empowerment has been building in me, I guess, all of my life. It’s in my nature to assert myself anyway – my point of view, my thinking – and the best way I can do that is through music. So, my songs are kind of telling anyway about my character.
“The Now album was really about going through the process of exercising my independence again as a solo writer and directing the music in a way that would be therapy for me.
“And it really worked. I found myself through that in a creative way I’d maybe questioned. That was so important. So I re-established that confidence in myself.”
The questioning of her creativity was because Lange was the producer of all her hugely successful albums up until Now.
“He was such a sounding board for me as a songwriter,” she says. “For 14 years that just became part of our collaboration, right?
“So, once there was no sounding board, now I’m whirling in my own. You know, ‘Can I really be objective? Can I…? Where do I begin?’ That was just a process. With the writing and even the recording of the album it was good to stand out alone, and I had a very caring and sensitive producer, Ron Aniello.”
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Shania Twain and her husband Frédéric Thiébaud as she received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011. Photo: Michael Tran/FilmMagic
As for the new album, Queen of Me, it contains a song that those with a sensitive nature might perhaps want to exercise caution listening to.
It has a classic hook that in time will be on a par with the withering line on ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ about Brad Pitt.
“Your pants are on fire,” sings Twain on ‘Pretty Liar’, “You’re such a f**king liar.”Autobiographical?
“Well,” she says. “It sort of is. But, you know, I’ve had this feeling a lot of times in my life where you meet somebody and they’re not sincere. They’re just playing you up. For a lot of this album, lyrically, I’m being honest.
“I was thinking more about my youth in all of this. I was thinking of those moments of that guy who was full of shit, really.”
Did you ever use that line – Your pants are on fire/You’re such a f**king liar – when you were younger?
“Oh, yeah. I mean, I was a big swearer when I was younger. Especially when I was younger. In the community that I grew up in and the environment that I grew up in, it is very normal to swear every second or third word.”
Same with the Irish but we sometimes say ‘feck’ instead, I tell her.
“I know that about you guys,” she laughs. “It is just one of those words that you can use in so many ways and it is very satisfying. But it belonged in this line. It’s very meaty.”
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Country music singer Shania Twain poses with the two Grammy Awards she won in 1999. Photo: Sam Mircovich
So is your philosophy to forgive but not to forget? “Yes, although I am somebody that, as a writer, tends to write myself out of the past. I wouldn’t make a very good psychiatrist.
“I’m more of a ‘don’t look back, don’t look down’ kind of person. So, I don’t think I forget in the deepest layers of the grooves. But I prefer to live more in a more forward-thinking way.”
Because if you live in the past, you’ll live in the pain?
“Absolutely, and there’s only so much room in our minds and our hearts to process every day.
“You can really get consumed and bogged down by the negativity. It’s like, ‘God, I don’t have room for this and I don’t have time for it. I’ve got to move on.’
“That’s the reason why I wrote the song ‘Queen of Me’, and the reason why I wrote this album, in general. You’ve got to move on and move through your fears.”
To some, she is a hero for how she has overcome personal tragedies and betrayals in her life and kept going.
“There are a lot of unsung heroes in life,” says Twain. “But in music I always refer to Dolly Parton. She’s such a positive person who never seems to let an insult bring her down.
“She’s clever. She’s talented. I refer to her. She’s somebody who really does soldier on with a smile.”
Twain could, of course, have been describing herself.
Shania Twain’s new album ‘Queen of Me’ is out now. She plays the 3Arena in Dublin on September 19 and 20
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/you-can-get-consumed-by-negativity-so-ive-got-to-move-on-shania-twain-opens-up-about-poverty-betrayal-divorce-and-why-her-extraordinary-life-has-left-her-feeling-empowered-42326362.html ‘You can get consumed by negativity. So I’ve got to move on’ – Shania Twain opens up about poverty, betrayal, divorce and why her extraordinary life has left her feeling empowered