Shania takes her moment
The Big Interview: As Canadian superstar opens a show in Las Vegas, she reflects on how life’s blows have affected her art
“I’m stronger in many ways because of what I went through as a young woman. I think it enabled me to cope with the betrayals I faced later in my life.”
Death has touched Shania Twain twice. The first time, it made her start singing. The second time, it made her stop.
The 47-year-old Canadian superstar is opening Dec. 1 at Caesars Palace — following in the Las Vegas footsteps of Céline Dion — and it’s providing her with a chance to re-examine her life.
In 1987, when Twain was 22, her parents died in a car crash outside Wawa, Ont.
To support her younger siblings, Twain began performing professionally at Deerhurst Resort, just outside of Huntsville.
“I had never worked in anything so formally produced before,” she says over the phone from Las Vegas, “and I know Deerhurst is a long way from Caesars, but I guess you start where you start. I had to take care of my family and singing is all I knew.”
Then, in 2008, she had to deal with a figurative rather than a literal death, when her marriage to Robert “Mutt” Lange ended after her discovery that he was having an affair with her best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud.
“That felt very much like a death, just like that of my parents. A major loss in my life. I know it wasn’t a physical death, but it was the death of a lot of things. The death of life as I knew it.
“And I stopped singing. That wasn’t a choice on my part. I literally couldn’t sing. For a while, it was as though that part of me had died as well.”
After a reclusive few years, Twain has gradually re-emerged into the public eye, writing her autobiography and launching a TV series on her life called Why Not?
But until she steps in front of the capacity crowd of 4,148 at The Colosseum on Dec. 1, she won’t have sung live since Lange left her.
“Yes, it’s been difficult revisiting all the old songs, because they all had a place in the life we had shared together. But that life is over. And so I had to take a different approach mentally to everything I’ve ever sung. So I’ve interpreted the songs in a different way through the production.”
Twain is cagey about revealing in advance what the show (called Shania: Still the One) is going to be like.
She begins by contrasting it with A New Day, the show with which Dion launched the venue in 2003.
“When Céline first came in, her show had a lot of Cirque du Soleiltype things about it. As the years went on, it became more and more Céline. That’s where I’m starting from. It’s a lot of Shania, for sure,” she laughs.
“All the elements of the show are very personal to me. It’s all very true and very sincere. There’s a lot of production, yes, but it’s all my production. It’s the Cirque de Shania.”
That’s an important step for Twain because, after a lifetime of singing to meet the demands of other people, she’s trying to reconnect with the way she felt about music as a child.
“I started out very innocently with singing, just enjoying it. Not having any expectations or plans. I would just sit around and sing to occupy myself. There was no thinking of what I was doing, I was just doing it.
“But even at that early age, I loved harmonies and was always trying experimental things with my voice. My mother recognized I had some talent.”
And promptly began using it. Twain recalls her mother waking her up in the middle of the night and bringing her into bars to sing, to make money for the family.
“Suddenly I was singing for a reason, a purpose,” she recalls. “Not a pleasure anymore. I was just doing it because someone told me to. I think that’s why I started writing songs when I was about 10. So that there could be something connected with music that was still private, still personal, still my own.”
Twain understandably gravitated toward the country-based singersongwriters of the period like Dolly Parton. Years later, she would pay homage to Parton by singing her “Coat of Many Colors” on the tribute album Just Because I’m a Woman, one artist who came from impoverished roots saluting another who had made the journey before her.
The almost-Dickensian squalor of Twain’s youth has been well reported: the spousal abuse her mother suffered, the stomach-grinding poverty, the alcoholism all around, the overnight journey to a shelter in Toronto in an attempt to find some kind of safety.
But from the vantage point of several decades, Twain can now look back on that period and find some positive elements.
“I’m stronger in many ways because of what I went through as a young woman. I think it enabled me to cope with the betrayals I faced later in my life. I know I wouldn’t have been able to survive the end of my own marriage if I hadn’t seen so many marriages crumble before me in the past.”
In Twain’s case, the dissolution was particularly painful on several counts. First of all, she had pretty much surrendered control of her life and her career to the shaggyhaired Svengali named Lange, who then cheated on her with her best friend in the world.
It made for a double-barrelled disaster that Twain had to deal with twice: when it happened and then when she wrote about it in her 2011 autobiography From This Moment On.
“I wrote the book chronologically. I thought my childhood would be the hardest thing to write about, but it wasn’t. It felt very cathartic and rewarding until I got to the divorce and the betrayal. All of a sudden, I didn’t know how to tell the story.
“I guess it’s because I was still experiencing it on some level and it was very difficult to be objective. But I knew I had to try and, in the end, it helped me find a new way of going about my life.”
There’s a long pause and Twain speaks with a voice huskier than usual.
“All of sudden, I wasn’t married to Mutt Lange anymore. It was like a giant canyon opened in my mind, in my life. What do I do now? I was lost, totally lost. It was such an abrupt change. I had to learn how to live my whole life differently without him. I had to start all over.”
Life wasn’t through throwing curve balls at Twain, but she hit the next one right out of the park for a home run. In a scenario no one could have envisioned, she fell in love with and married Frédéric Thiébaud, the ex-husband of the woman who stole her man.
She laughs over the seeming absurdity of it all.
“I said to myself ‘How can I tell the world this?’ because it was so odd and unexpected. How could I have known this guy all these years and not have noticed the kind of man he was? Well, we were formal friends. We didn’t hang out. It was his wife I was personal friends with . . . ”
Twain leaves that sentence hanging.
“I guess when you’re dedicated to the man you’re with, as I was with Mutt Lange, you’re not looking and you don’t see those things, but afterwards, it’s all a different story.” Twain and Thiébaud married on Jan. 1, 2011, and Twain is still surprised at her good luck and great happiness. “We all have these moments when we’ve just got to say, ‘Life must have its own plan.’ Things just do fall out of the sky and you have to take it with a smile.” She knows that it still might strike people as strange, but she remains philosophical. “Everybody else can or can’t accept it as they see fit. The only person I really cared about accepting it was my son and he did.” Twain doesn’t feel this Vegas engagement “is the fulfilment of a dream or the end of the rainbow. I don’t think like that anymore. I take it one song at a time. “There is still love after love. There is still life after life. I know that now.”