From her traumatic childhood to superstar status — the country-pop hitmaker opens up about surviving abuse, infidelity and divorce.
“My dream,” Shania Twain says of her Glastonbury debut this weekend, “is to ride on stage on a horse.” Well, the festival does take place on a farm. “I know! I’m not being unrealistic.” What else does she know about the muddy weekender? “The first thing people say is, ‘Do you own wellies?’ And I’ll wear a cowboy hat in case it rains.” She also intends to put on a disguise and wander around the site. “How far is it from Stonehenge?”
A good hour by car, I’m afraid — unless Twain is choppered in. Still, a visit to the landmark up the A303 or not, the Canadian singer’s jaunt to Somerset has the makings of a triumph. She will play the Sunday Legends slot recently graced by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie. Last year’s headliner, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, was the emotional highlight of the event, playing Wild World to flagging revellers thinking about home time, and Twain knows what she has to bring — horse aside. “It’s about energy.”
She will also stick to the hits — and has more than you might think. Her 1997 album, Come on Over, is the 15th bestselling record in the UK and a ridiculous 12 of its 16 tracks were singles. You’re Still the One is the timeless ballad (with 529 million streams on Spotify), while Man! I Feel Like a Woman! (579 million streams) and That Don’t Impress Me Much (196 million streams) are the anthemic bangers. The latter contains the lyric: “OK, so you’re Brad Pitt/ That don’t impress me much.” Who would be the 2024 version of an iconic hunk? “Harry Styles,” Twain says instantly. “He is the new Elvis.”
Incidentally, Twain plans on bringing out a surprise guest at Glastonbury, and while she keeps shtoom on who it is, one might note that when Styles headlined Coachella in 2022, he brought out … Twain.
We meet in London, a short hop from Switzerland, where Twain, 58, lives with her second husband, the businessman Frédéric Thiébaud. She has one grown-up son, Eja, from her first marriage to the producer Mutt Lange. Today Twain is dressed down in well-worn trainers and jeans, her hair loosely tied up — a world away from her normal stage get-up of various animal prints and pink outfits as elaborate as Elton John’s. But this divide is something she has lived for her entire life. On stage she is exuberance and showmanship; in person, her voice a little raspy and pinched, it’s clear that her public self is the make-believe persona of someone who is very, very real.
For many, Twain is simply the country music star who went stratospherically pop, a purveyor of fun, camp hits made for dancing in arenas. That is just the surface, though, because beneath the glitz is her story of poverty, abuse, exploitation, grief, illness and divorce, all so extreme that even Charles Dickens would have turned it down for being unbelievable.
Brutal beginnings
Twain was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1965, one of three girls to Sharon and Clarence. Her parents divorced when Twain was two and her mother’s second husband, Jerry, whom Twain calls her father, adopted Twain and her sisters. The family lived in poverty, with the children often going to school hungry. When she was eight Twain started singing covers of country songs in bars for money and as an outlet. Jerry was violent to Sharon, once beating her unconscious, and he abused Twain too. He made her walk around the house topless and would “fondle” her.
Then in 1987, when Twain was 22 and trying to make a career in music away from home, both of her parents died in a car crash, forcing her to move back to look after her younger siblings. That is a lot to unpack — and after Jerry died Twain still talked about him with admiration, grieving a man who abused her and beat her mother.
“It’s complicated, conflicting and very difficult to understand from the outside,” she admits. “You would need a criminal psychologist to understand it, so how would I explain it? I’m not a criminal psychologist. Or a trauma psychologist. So I can’t.”
She pauses and grins. Much like her cultural and spiritual predecessor, Dolly Parton, Twain knows that if you want the rainbow you have got to put up with the rain. “However, what is explainable is that my life and career as me, Shania Twain, is so different from my youth that nobody would ever imagine they’re the same person.”
I mention Black Eyes, Blue Tears from Come on Over. With its title and the lyric “I’d rather die standin’/ Than live on my knees,” it feels as if it is an important song about her past — although a lot of fans don’t know what it’s really about.
She nods. “Many people don’t know these songs start in here,” Twain says, hand resting on her heart. “One thing I avoided the most in my life was becoming my mother or being in her situation. I had to break that cycle. But when people hear that song they may not think I lived that. You have a story, that’s one thing. Then you put it into a three-minute commercial song and it’s not just a story — it’s a song. And my story was never part of a commercial career.”
This trauma hiding in plain sight is best illustrated with Twain’s most upbeat song — Man! I Feel Like a Woman! Nowadays it is an anthem but the singer wrote it for personal reasons traceable to the abuse inflicted on her as a child.
“That song,” she says, “was me saying, I have waited too long to feel good about being a woman. For many years I shied away from it or wished I wasn’t a woman. I was a shy, insecure female — not person. My brain said, ‘I don’t really care what I am,’ but my body got in the way — the female got in the way. I’ve got curves so I had to set boundaries and guards very young. I did everything not to bring attention to them. I missed out on the joy of being a female. Shit, for my whole teens I never once went to the beach in a bathing suit. I knew that boys were going to take advantage of me in one way or another.”
Is that because she’d grown up thinking it was how all men behaved? “Well, they were like that,” she snaps back with incredulity. “But then I became tired of acting like I’m not a female with curves, so I wrote Man! I Feel Like a Woman! I guess I was a late bloomer in getting comfortable in my own skin, but after a while you just have to stop picking away at the things you can’t change.”
Twain fought to get here — to Glastonbury and to her other vast shows around the country, including Hyde Park in London in July. She paved the way for Taylor Swift, too, both of them starting in Nashville before going into pop. I mention that Glastonbury has recently been accused of not having enough female acts, certainly not in the top billing. With Twain, Dua Lipa and SZA in prime slots this year, the conversation has calmed somewhat, but Twain thinks it will return, mostly because female performers remain in the minority across the industry.
“And how can you dream of being somebody if only one in every 20 adults that you admire is the same sex as you?” Twain asks. “When you are a child you identify with people and see possibilities, but there is a lack of representation for women in this industry. It’s a lot more than just sexism, it’s about representation — for young girls to go, ‘I want to be her,’ you need to make that feel obtainable.
“But let’s also be realistic. A lot of girls don’t want to be in bar bands like I was throughout my childhood and teens. But you have to start somewhere. You can’t just be Beyoncé. In those grungy zones you travel around dirty places and the beds have bugs half the goddamn time. You’ll have to lift shit, load trucks. Some bars in Canada had a room for live music and another for strip shows — not a lot of girls are attracted to that. That scene is more intimidating for a girl because men are drunk and boundaries get blurry. How can you attract women to that? How do they feel safe and stay protected?”
She does not have the answers, but it feels as if this route into the industry was a necessity for her — which is perhaps the answer in itself. First she sang to escape her home, then to earn money for her siblings. Later she had Lyme disease and had to cope with Lange running off with her best friend — before Twain married Thiébaud, the same best friend’s husband. Her life really is packed with the fodder of so many country songs — she forgives Lange, but not her best friend. Indeed, she admits that she dreams of bad things happening to that woman. But add all this pain up and it is clear why Glastonbury and its 100,000-strong crowd feels like such a victory. How did she make it this far? “There was no other way,” she says bluntly.
“If I wanted to get to a place where I could play demos for a label, the bar scene was how I had to do it. How anybody has got to do it. You might be a super-talented girl, but just not attracted to going to music conservatory or, say, playing the flute. You want to do what Taylor [Swift] does, or what Shania does.” She pauses. “But you need character.”
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London