The Full Biography
Shania Twain. Singer. The Timmins girl who wrote the country-pop century a set of hooks, lost the voice to a disease, and then learned how to sing again.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a woman in a midriff and a headset, telling a stadium that she feels like a woman, or a ballad that still walks into a wedding and sits down. The year was 1997, or 1998, or 1999. The album was Come On Over. What the still cannot show is Eilleen Regina Edwards of Windsor and Timmins, a child who sang in Canadian clubs at eight because the household needed the money, a sister who raised siblings after a car crash, and a living woman who spent years speaking in a whisper and then booked a residency anyway.
She was born on August 28, 1965, in Windsor, Ontario, to Sharon and Clarence Edwards. The marriage ended. Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwe man from the Temagami area, and the family settled in Timmins, a mining city in northern Ontario that does not look like Nashville. She took the Twain name. The stage name Shania — she has said it comes from an Ojibwe word meaning “on my way” — arrived when the records needed a door. The first pressure was not a label. It was a kitchen. She has described a childhood of shortage and of a mother who believed the girl’s voice was a way out. She sang in bars after midnight on school nights. The hat was passed. The homework waited.
On November 1, 1987, Sharon and Jerry were killed in a car crash on a highway in northern Ontario. Eilleen was twenty-two. She moved her younger siblings into a home she could keep and took a job singing at the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville so the family would have a wage. The door was not a talent-show coronation. It was a resort stage and a grief. Mercury Nashville signed her. The debut album, Shania Twain (1993), did not rearrange the map. It put a name on a shelf.
Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the rock producer who had already made Def Leppard and AC/DC into climates, heard the voice and the writing. They married in 1993. They built a method: country instruments, pop hooks, rock weight, a woman on the record who sounded like she had written the dare herself. The Woman in Me (1995) was the first weather. “Any Man of Mine” went to No. 1 on the country chart. The album sold in the many millions and took a Grammy. Nashville argued about whether it was country. The rest of the continent bought it and did not wait for the argument to end.
Then Come On Over (1997). It is, by the ledgers the industry still uses, the best-selling studio album by a female artist and the best-selling country album of all time. “You’re Still the One.” “From This Moment On.” “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” “Honey, I’m Home.” The songs crossed from country radio onto pop radio without asking the format’s permission. She played the videos as if the videos were the second album. A generation of girls learned a stance from those clips. A generation of weddings learned a processional from the ballads. She has sold more than eighty-five million records. The number is a climate, not a personality.
The Come On Over singles were a two-year weather system. “You’re Still the One” crossed onto the Hot 100 and sat near the top as if country radio had been a rehearsal. “From This Moment On,” first a duet with Bryan White on the album, became a wedding standard in a solo dress. “That Don’t Impress Me Much” made a joke of the pretty man and the sports car and then made the joke a world hit. “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” is the stance a mall still rents. “Honey, I’m Home.” “You’ve Got a Way.” She toured the record as the Come On Over Tour, 1998–99, arenas that had not always been built for a woman from Timmins. The videos — the headset, the midriff, the hair — taught television how to sell the album a second time. Nashville’s format argument kept running. The receipts had already ended it.
She wrote, with Lange, as a shop. The midriff was a choice and a fight; television shows that wanted the voice but not the navel made their little weathers. She kept the navel. She also kept the writing credit. Up! (2002) came in more than one mix — country, pop, and a world version — a producer’s stunt that was also a way to refuse a single cage. “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!” and “Forever and for Always” carried the method into a new decade. A son, Eja, was born in 2001. The family made a life in Switzerland, a distance from Timmins and from Music Row that she treated as oxygen. A Greatest Hits package in 2004, with a few new cuts, looked for a while like a period at the end of the sentence. It was only a comma. The illness had not yet been named in public. The voice had already begun to argue.
The marriage ended in a way the columns could not resist. Lange had an affair with her friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud. The friendship, the marriage, and the producing partnership collapsed in the same weather. In 2011 she married Frédéric Thiébaud, Marie-Anne’s former husband, a sentence that is true and still sounds like a treatment. She has not made a career of explaining it. She has said enough. The music stopped being easy at the same time. Lyme disease, which she has described as arriving from a tick, damaged the nerves that ran the voice. Dysphonia followed. The woman who had sold the decade a set of hooks could not count on a whisper.
I thought I lost my voice forever. I thought that was it. I would never, ever sing again.Shania Twain
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the midriff clips still play as if 1998 never ended. The turn is the silence: a decade in which the best-selling woman in country could not do the job, and then the decision to do the job anyway, in a different throat, in a different marriage, in a room in Las Vegas that did not require her to be twenty-nine.
Six things most people never knew
- She was Eilleen Edwards first. Windsor, 1965. Timmins raised. Jerry Twain’s surname. Shania is a door she built, not a hospital bracelet.
- The clubs at eight are a wage, not a cute story. A household that needed the hat to be passed. School nights. A mother who believed the voice was the exit.
- November 1, 1987, is the crash. Sharon and Jerry dead on a northern highway. A twenty-two-year-old who kept the younger siblings and took a resort job at Deerhurst.
- Come On Over is a world ledger, not only a country fact. 1997. Best-selling studio album by a woman, by the counts the trade still uses. The hooks paid the silence that followed.
- Lyme and dysphonia took the voice she had sold the century. A whisper. A fear, said out loud, that she would never sing again. The comeback is a medical fact as much as a marketing one.
- The second marriage sits on the wreckage of the first. Lange, Marie-Anne, Frédéric Thiébaud, 2011. She did not tour the triangle. She toured when the throat allowed.
Five Grammy Awards sit in the file. A Hollywood Walk of Fame star arrived in 2011, the same season as the Vegas decision. Friends from Timmins describe a girl who was already working when other children were asleep. That part did not change when the stadiums arrived. It also did not change when the stadiums went dark. She has written a memoir, From This Moment On, that holds the crash, the marriage, and the illness without turning them into a talk-show medley. Eja has had to share a mother with a catalog the mall still plays. She has tried, in the years of the whisper and after, to make the house larger than the mall.
The later years
The years after the voice failed have been a reconstruction, not a farewell tour in slow motion. Still the One, the Las Vegas residency that opened at Caesars Palace in 2012, was the first public proof that a different throat could hold a room. She did not sound like 1998. She sounded like a woman who had gone to school on her own instrument a second time. The residency ran into 2014. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has not been the point; country halls and Canadian honours have. She took them as receipts and kept the physical therapy that made the receipts possible.
Now (2017) was the first album of new songs in fifteen years, written in the weather after Lange and after the whisper. It is not Come On Over. It does not try to be. “Life’s About to Get Good” is a title that knows what it is arguing with. She took the album on the Now Tour and discovered that the arenas still stood up for the old hooks and would stay for the new throat. Queen of Me (2023) put her back on the road again — the Queen of Me Tour — in rooms that wanted a woman in her fifties to be 1998 and were given someone more interesting. She has spoken, in interviews that do not always stay gentle, about the Lyme, about the dysphonia, about the fear that the job was over. She has also, in those same interviews, sounded like the Timmins girl who had already done a harder job in 1987. The stadium is easier than a highway and three younger siblings. She knows it.
Canadian honours and a Hollywood star are in the same file as the whisper. She has performed at sporting sacraments and at Juno nights that treat her as national weather. She has not become a Nashville committee chair. She has become a woman who can talk about a tick and a divorce and a passed hat in the same hour and then still open with “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” because the room came for that too. The second voice is not the first. She has said so. The second voice is the one that had to be built after the first was taken. That is the chapter Come On Over could not have predicted and the one the residency proved in public, night after night, under a Caesars marquee.
Home has been Switzerland and then other addresses, a life with Frédéric that the columns eventually grew bored of, which is a kind of luck. She has performed at the Super Bowl’s kind of civic sacrament and at Canadian award shows that treat her as a national fact. She has not become a Nashville committee. She has become a woman in her fifties and sixties who can still open a Friday with a song a bride already knows, and who can still stand in a residency and tell the truth about a tick. The midriff posters are still in the mall. The woman in them is not. That is all right. The woman onstage is the one who had to find the note again.
She is, as this is written, still touring when the calendar and the throat agree. The best-selling-album fact still walks into every profile. The crash still walks in behind it. The whisper still walks in behind that. She has not asked the public to pick one. She has asked the public, by showing up, to accept a voice that is not the 1998 voice and is still hers. That is a harder trick than a No. 1. She has done both.
After the spotlight moved
It moved to the next crossover, and then it came back every time a wedding needed “You’re Still the One” or a gym needed “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” Younger women in country-pop who write the dare themselves are in her house whether they send a note or not. Come On Over still sells a Friday in some shop in the world. The Vegas years still sell the idea that a lost voice can be a second career. Timmins still claims the girl who sang for a passed hat.
She came out of Windsor, grew up in Timmins, sang for a household wage, buried her parents on a November highway, wrote the hooks with a rock producer she married, sold more records than the format had budgeted, lost the marriage and the voice in the same era, married the other man in the story, and learned to sing again in a room in Las Vegas. If you only remember the midriff, you have the still. If you remember the crash, the hat passed in a Timmins bar, the whisper, and a woman who booked the residency anyway, you have her.
Portrait: David Swales (derivative by Bserin) · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons