Twain feared losing her voice
Post-surgery journey has been ‘rewarding’
Shania Twain feared she’d never sing again before undergoing two open-throat procedures to fix complications caused by Lyme disease.
The country music icon returned to the studio after a 15-year break from recording when she released her fifth studio album, Now, in 2017. And speaking to Extra TV, the Canadian star, 53, confessed that before she went under the knife she was unsure whether her voice would ever be strong enough to perform again.
“I had to have an operation that was very intense and it’s an open-throat operation, very different from a vocal cord operation,” she said.
“I had to have two of them, so that was really, really, really tough. And I survived that, meaning emotionally I survived, and am just ready to keep going.”
Twain said her post-surgery voice sounds different from how she sounded before her health complications, and since the procedure she’s had to learn to sing again.
“What I’ve learned in the interim through therapy is how to manipulate my voice to get it to do what I want it to do or at least close enough that I ... don’t want to give up, so I’m willing,” Twain said.
“You’ve just got to be willing and give in to change and you have to accept that you don’t always have to be the same and that’s what I have to do, and I’m embracing that.
“When you’re a singer and it’s your voice, it is just a terrible, terrible feeling.” she said. “It was a great, great loss, so I had to come to terms with losing the voice that I had and rediscovering my new one. It’s been a long, a really rewarding, journey.”
Twain begins another Las Vegas residency in December.