Losing her husband and co-writer. Losing her voice. Fifteen years away. Can Shania Twain now reclaim her throne as the Queen of pop-country? Shania Twain is back to prove she is still the one we want after a lengthy break from the music industry. It has been an epic 15 years since the biggest-selling female country artist of all time released the mega-selling Up!, but what has kept her? The answer is that Canadian queen of pop-country has been dealing with real life. Big, unpleasant dollops of it, like divorce, infectious disease and career-threatening vocal problems. She doesn’t want you to think she’s been ignoring for all this time us on purpose. “I’ve been very busy raising my son [Eja, recently turned 16] and I’ve been very productive as well,” she says as she sits down to meet Country Music in the plush setting of an elegant London hotel. “I just wasn’t productive in making an album project, because of my voice. So I never collected my writing. I was writing all the time, but I wasn’t writing for an album. So it took a little while to organise all of that. “I wrote a book [the 2011 extraordinary autobiography From This Moment On], I did Vegas things for two years, and my voice did very well in a controlled environment. Then I did a tour, and that gave me more encouragement, then I built up to making the album.” Getting back in the studio, she admits, was when push came to shove, “the most scary statement to make, vocally, because it’s so permanent.” “It’s not like a live show, where it comes and goes,” she explains further, “once you put it out there, that’s it.” Twain is very much out there again with Now, a huge-sounding, hook-laden return to everything that ever made Shania sell by the multi-million in the first place. Its pop confections may reopen the time-honoured debate about how country she is. But such semantics would have been way down the list of priorities when she decided, after recovering from Lyme’s disease and the loss of not just her voice but also of producer, co-writer and former muse ‘Mutt’ Lange, that she was going to write the whole thing on her own. Remembering that painful period, she recalls: “Now I’m going to have to produce the whole project, because nobody knows me, and I wouldn’t even have known who to trust. Who would I write with? Would anybody want to write with me? I’d been quiet for so long, I just wasn’t sure where I would fit in that. So I thought, the more independent I can be with this, the better. It puts me to the test. And I committed myself to writing the whole album by myself. “Once I got past that point of just getting started, it’s like going to the gym. The hardest part is getting there, right? Getting yourself dressed and out the door, and then once you’re there, it all starts happening. Of course it’s painful, you’re going to be sore the next day and go through some ups and downs. But you’ve taken that initial step. Once I dived in, I was committed, and then it really just got easier from there, to be honest.” Twain and Lange split in 2008, after she discovered that he had been having an affair with her best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. As if that wasn’t high-profile enough, she went on to marry Thiébaud’s estranged husband, Frédéric, and she knew the tabloids would be like pigs in the proverbial. “Of course!” she laughs heartily. “I thought to myself, well, there are just some things you can’t keep from the press. So on that hand I’m thinking, ‘The best thing to do is just get it out there so that they stop asking me things that they already know.’ Instead of leaving people digging, it was just so much easier to say yup, this is the way it is, and now there’s nothing to dig for. “I’m not ashamed, I don’t need to apologise for what I’ve been through. It’s just what it is. I think transparency is sometimes just the best way to go. We all have the right to preserve our privacy without being called dishonest. That’s not a question of ‘true or false, it’s a question of: ‘Do I want to share that or not?’ There’s a level of transparency that I think does disarm a lot of unnecessary conversation, and it’s a relief for me.” Now is an album in which Twain disarmingly lays bare her raw emotions, sometimes musing in the first person about how she can’t believe her longtime partner would leave her. But more often, she’s in pugnacious form, “swinging with her eyes closed” and later announcing, nay demanding, that “more fun is what we need.” These are probably the most personal songs Twain has ever recorded, and there’s been something cathartic for her in laying things on the line. “I don’t just do it for entertainment, although we all love to be entertained and I want to be entertaining,” she says. “But I’m always just myself anyway. I’m not acting when I’m on stage. I’m singing my own truth, I’m not even interpreting. I’m not just presenting the song as the performer, I am the song and I’m extending my story by singing it to people.” In any case, if you know anything about Twain’s upbringing, you know she’s been through worse than this. After her parents split when she was just two, she started to sing in nightclubs when she was just eight, to help the family’s threadbare finances. “Those clubs were my performing arts school,” she laughs. “There was a detriment, because I developed stage fright there. I think it was just being forced into an environment that was so uncomfortable for an eight-year-old. It was very smoky in those days, I could barely breath, and it was dark and quite sinister. Everybody was
