Shania Twain

• 1. Introduction

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  Shania Twain has sold over 100 million records, more than any other woman in country music history. Billboard Boxscore puts the gross from her concert tours at 421.1 million dollars, the highest for any female country touring artist. Billboard also named her the leader of the 1990s country pop crossover stars. Yet she was born under another name. She grew up with a surname that did not come from her birth father. Her stage first name has a meaning that people still argue over. How does a child from northern Ontario reach that scale, who shaped the climb, and what happened when her own singing voice began to fail?

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• 2. Two Fathers

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  Eilleen Regina Edwards was born in Windsor, Ontario, on the 28th of August 1965. Her mother, Sharon, was of Irish descent, and her father, Clarence Edwards, worked as a railway engineer. She had two sisters, Jill and Carrie Ann. Their parents divorced when Eilleen was two, and Sharon moved the girls to Timmins, Ontario. There Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwe man from the nearby Mattagami First Nation. They had a son, Mark. Jerry adopted the three girls and legally changed their surname to Twain. Later, when Jerry's baby nephew Darryl lost his mother, the couple adopted him as well.

  For years Twain avoided publicly naming Edwards as her father, and she later explained why. She said Jerry had gone out of his way to raise three daughters who were not his own. Acknowledging a man who was never there for her would have hurt him terribly. Nobody in the household spoke of step-fathers or step-brothers. To use that word about Jerry, she said, would have been "the worst slap across the face to him."

  Because of her link to Jerry, the media have incorrectly reported that Twain is of Ojibwe descent. Once her success arrived, the Timmins Daily Press ran several stories under sensationalistic headlines. In them, relatives of her biological father sold personal details about her life and accused her of using Native ancestry as a career-promoting ploy. The Ojibwe community that raised her thought the likely motive was mercenary. A cousin of her adoptive father spoke for the family, saying "we treated her as Native, raised her as Native. We accepted her as part of our family, no questions asked."

  Roger Ellis, then president of the First Americans in the Arts, had given Twain an award for Outstanding Musical Achievement. He said it was given in good faith, on the basis of her Canadian reserve card. He concluded that she had not intentionally misrepresented herself. She holds a status card and is on the official band membership list of the Temagami First Nation. In 1991 she was offered a recording contract in Nashville and applied for immigration status in the United States. Because Jerry was full-blooded Ojibwe and the Jay Treaty of 1795 protects indigenous rights, she became legally registered as having 50 percent indigenous American blood.

  Her confirmed ancestry is Irish and French. Through a maternal great-grandmother, she descends from the French carpenter Zacharie Cloutier. Her Irish maternal grandmother, Eileen Pearce, emigrated from Newbridge, County Kildare. On her father's side, a half-brother of her father is the Dutch country singer Henk Wijngaard, who has 20 top-40 hits in the Netherlands.

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• 3. Bars and Forests

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  Food was often scarce in the Twain household in Timmins, and her parents earned little. Young Eilleen never told school authorities, because she feared they might break up the family. Her adoptive father was abusive, and from early on she watched his violence against her mother, who struggled with bouts of depression. She once persuaded Sharon to flee with the children to a homeless shelter in Toronto. Sharon went back to Jerry with the children in 1981.

  At the age of eight, Twain began singing in Timmins bars to help pay the family's bills. After the bar had stopped serving alcohol, she sang for the remaining customers between midnight and 1 a.m., often earning C$20. She did not enjoy it. She recalled thinking "I hate this" and hating being around drunks. But she loved the music, and she later called those nights her own kind of performing arts school on the road. Writing songs, she said, was very different from performing them, and it became more and more important to her.

  At 13, she was invited to perform on the CBC's Tommy Hunter Show. At Timmins High and Vocational School she sang for a local band called Longshot, which covered Top 40 music. In the early 1980s she also worked in her father's reforestation business in northern Ontario, which employed about 75 Ojibwe and Cree workers. The labour was demanding and the pay low. Workers could use nothing scented, not even soap or deodorant, and they washed themselves and their clothes in the lake. She said she loved the feeling of being stranded. She would sit alone in the forest with her dog and a guitar and write songs.

  Twain graduated from Timmins High in June 1983. After Longshot ended, a cover band called Flirt, led by Diane Chase, took her on tour around Ontario. She paid for singing lessons with the Toronto coach Ian Garrett by cleaning his house. In the autumn of 1984, the Toronto DJ Stan Campbell wrote in Country Music News that "Eilleen possesses a powerful voice with an impressive range." She sang backing vocals on "Heavy on the Sunshine," a song on an album Campbell was making with the Canadian musician Tim Denis.

  The country singer Mary Bailey saw her perform in Sudbury, Ontario. She remembered a young woman with a guitar singing Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Twain also sang a few songs of her own. Bailey wondered how someone about nineteen could write them, saying they sounded like they came from "a person who's lived sixty years."

  On the 1st of November 1987, Twain's mother and adoptive father died in a car accident about 50 km north of Wawa, Ontario. She moved back to Timmins to look after her younger siblings, then took them all to Huntsville, Ontario. There she supported them by performing at the nearby Deerhurst Resort.

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• 4. A Name and a Flop

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  Once her siblings had moved out on their own, Twain put together a demo tape of her songs. Her manager in Huntsville arranged a showcase where record executives could hear her material. Several labels took notice, and Mercury Nashville Records signed her within a few months. Around this time she changed her first name to Shania. A rumour says it is an Ojibwe word meaning "on my way."

  Her biographer, Robin Eggar, wrote that no mispronounced or misheard phrase in Ojibwe or Cree comes close to that meaning. Yet he noted that the legend keeps being repeated in the media. Cleveland Evans, writing in the Omaha World-Herald, disagreed that nothing comes close. He pointed to the Ojibwe words "Ani aya'aa," which he translated as "someone on the way." He suggested that someone with imperfect knowledge of Ojibwe may have created Shania with the wrong idea of its meaning.

  Her self-titled debut album reached North American stores on the 20th of April 1993. It climbed to No. 67 on the US Country Albums Chart and drew positive reviews, but it sold few copies at first. Only in 1999, after her later success had stirred interest, did the Recording Industry Association of America certify it platinum for over 1 million sales. Two minor US hits came from it, "What Made You Say That" and "Dance with the One That Brought You." A third single, "You Lay a Whole Lot of Love on Me," failed to chart. Europe responded better, and Country Music Television Europe named her its "Rising Video Star of the Year."

  Twain herself was unhappy with the record. In her 2011 autobiography, From This Moment On, she said she had very little creative control and could not show what she could do as a songwriter. She co-wrote just one song, "God Ain't Gonna Getcha for That." Around the same time she sang backing vocals for other Mercury artists, including Jeff Chance on Walk Softly on the Bridges and Sammy Kershaw on Haunted Heart. Meanwhile, a rock producer named Robert John "Mutt" Lange had been listening to her album.

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• 5. Lange and Breakthrough

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  Mutt Lange heard the original songs and the singing on her debut and offered to produce her and write with her. After many telephone conversations, they met at Nashville's Fan Fair in June 1993. Within weeks they were very close, and they married on the 28th of December 1993.

  The Woman in Me reached stores on the 7th of February 1995. Twain and Lange co-wrote every song on it except one. Of its 12 tracks, eight became singles. The first, "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?", reached number 11 on the Billboard country chart. "Any Man of Mine" followed as her first country Top 10 and her first number one. It also cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100. The title track peaked at number 14, and three more number ones came with "(If You're Not in It for Love) I'm Outta Here!", "You Win My Love" and "No One Needs to Know." That last song was chosen for the soundtrack of the 1996 film Twister, a first for her.

  Australia heard a different version. Five of the singles were remixed for the Australian pop market, and "I'm Outta Here!" became her breakthrough hit there, reaching number 5.

  Mercury Nashville built its promotion around music videos, and every single from the album had one. Twain appeared twice on the Late Show with David Letterman, and she also appeared on the Blockbuster Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards and the American Music Awards. By 2007 the album had sold more than 12 million copies in the United States and was certified Diamond. It won the Grammy Award for Best Country Album and the Academy of Country Music award for Album of the Year. The Academy also named her Best New Female Vocalist.

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• 6. Two Giant Albums

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  Twelve of the sixteen tracks on Come On Over, released in 1997, eventually became singles. The early ones, "Love Gets Me Every Time" and "Don't Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)," put her more often on the Billboard Hot 100 and got the album moving. When "You're Still the One" arrived as the third single, sales surged. The album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the charts for two years. It went on to sell 40 million copies worldwide. That made it the top-selling country album in history and the ninth highest-selling album by any artist in the United States. Four Grammy Awards came from it, including Best Country Song and Best Female Country Performance for "You're Still the One" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" Lange won Grammys for "You're Still the One" and "Come On Over."

  In 1998, Europe received a different record. A remixed version of Come On Over, with less country instrumentation, went to the European market as a pop album. It reached No. 1 on the UK album charts for 11 weeks and became the biggest-selling album of the year there, with nearly 4 million copies in the UK alone. Germany bought more than one million. The pop remix of "That Don't Impress Me Much" reached number 3 in the UK and the Top 10 in Germany. "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" peaked at number 3 in both the UK and France. "You've Got a Way" was remixed specifically for the film Notting Hill. In the United States, the album set a record for the longest stay in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200, at 99 weeks.

  Twain launched her first major concert tour in 1998 with her manager Jon Landau, a veteran of many large tours with Bruce Springsteen. Pollstar Concert Industry Awards named the Come On Over Tour Country Tour of the Year in both 1998 and 1999. A Christmas album planned for 2000 was cancelled later that year.

  QPrime then replaced Landau as her management. After a two-year break and the birth of her son Eja on the 12th of August 2001, Twain and Lange returned to the studio. Up! was released on the 19th of November 2002 as three different discs, a green one for country and acoustic, a red one for pop and rock, and a blue one for world and dance. The international disc was remixed with Indian-style orchestral and percussion parts recorded in Mumbai. The brothers Simon and Diamond Duggal of Birmingham, England, produced the new versions.

  On the 26th of January 2003, she performed in the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVII. Up! debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, selling 874,000 copies in its first week, and held the top spot for five weeks. Rolling Stone gave it four out of five stars. In Europe, "Ka-Ching!" criticised unchecked consumerism and reached number 1 in Germany and Austria, though it was never released as a single in North America. The ballad "Forever and for Always" was her biggest US single from the album, peaking at 4 on the country chart, 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart and 20 on the Hot 100. By January 2008, Up! had sold 5.5 million copies in the US and was certified Diamond. That made her the only female artist in history with three consecutive Diamond albums.

  In November 2004, on the BBC charity telethon Children in Need, she performed "Up!" and then let the magician Scott Penrose saw her in half in an illusion called Clearly Impossible.

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• 7. Voice and Return

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  The Greatest Hits album of 2004 carried three new tracks, led by the duet "Party for Two." The country version with Billy Currington made the top ten, and the pop version with Sugar Ray singer Mark McGrath reached the top ten in the United Kingdom and Germany. Then she entered a long hiatus. Years later she explained that diagnoses of Lyme disease and dysphonia had severely weakened her singing voice. Physicians she consulted over the years mostly blamed emotional stress. She recovered from that stress by trying relaxation techniques and spending much time on vocal warmups.

  On the 15th of May 2008, it was announced that she and Lange were separating, after Lange had an affair with Twain's best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Their divorce was finalised on the 9th of June 2010. In August 2009, a spokesman for her label said at a conference in Timmins that a new record was still "nowhere in sight." Twain later married Frédéric Thiébaud, a Swiss Nestlé executive and Marie-Anne's former husband, on the 1st of January 2011 in Rincón, Puerto Rico.

  Her return began on television. The OWN series Why Not? with Shania Twain debuted on the 8th of May 2011 and followed her vocal rehabilitation. Her autobiography, From This Moment On, was published on the 27th of March 2011. "Today Is Your Day," her first new single in six years, was released on the 12th of June 2011, with producers David Foster and Nathan Chapman. Her show Still the One at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas ran from the 1st of December 2012 to the 13th of December 2014. Her Rock This Country Tour opened on the 5th of June 2015 in Seattle and closed on the 27th of October in Kelowna, British Columbia. By August of that year she said she had written 38 songs for the next album.

  Now was released on the 29th of September 2017 and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, her second album to do so. It was the first album she wrote without Lange. She said, "I needed to do it alone, to start ideas and finish them without relying on anybody else's opinion and direction." She also used it to work through the end of their relationship. In 2018 she underwent laryngoplasty, in which Gore-Tex stabilizers were implanted in her throat to reduce the workload on her vocal muscles. She has said her voice is not as strong as before her Lyme disease diagnosis, and she had to learn to navigate it.

  Her second Las Vegas residency, Let's Go!, opened on the 6th of December 2019 and ended on the 10th of September 2022 after several postponements caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In July 2022, Netflix released the documentary Not Just a Girl. She signed with Republic Nashville that September, and her sixth album, Queen of Me, came out on the 3rd of February 2023. It debuted atop the UK Albums Chart, her third UK number one after Come On Over and Now. The Queen of Me Tour followed, with 76 dates. In June 2024 she played the traditional Sunday Legends slot at the Glastonbury Festival. On the 12th of May 2026, she announced a new album, Little Miss Twain, planned for the 24th of July 2026, alongside its lead single, "Dirty Rosie."

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• 8. Midriff and Influence

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  Critics gave her bare midriff a nickname, "The most famous midriff in Nashville." CMT banned the music video for her debut single, "What Made You Say That." Her record label warned her that men would dislike her independence and women would dislike her sexual expressiveness, and she did not believe them. The country rock musician Steve Earle called her "the world's highest-paid lap-dancer." Some country critics said her music was not country enough. Some fans think that is why The Woman in Me was snubbed at the 1995 Country Music Awards despite its success.

  Because she had not yet begun touring, she used videos to reach a wider audience. The critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine considers her the first country artist to fully exploit MTV's style. Record executives in the 1990s also feared that her lyrics were too "male-threatening." Both The Woman in Me and Come On Over contain feminist and anti-infidelity themes. She has said that women who stand up for themselves are often misunderstood. Speaking up, she argued, does not mean they do not love or need the men in their lives.

  Over time, the verdict shifted. NPR's Jewly Hight wrote that despite early derision, Twain influenced a generation of country artists. They made flashier music videos, strengthened their backbeats and staged shows with the theatricality of arena rock. Taylor Swift credits Twain for her own pop crossover. Carrie Underwood says Twain "paved the way for a lot of us." Harry Styles has named her his biggest influence in both music and fashion. Post Malone was infatuated with her as a child, and she covered his song "Rockstar" live at the American Music Awards.

  In 1999, both the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association named her Entertainer of the Year. She was the first non-US citizen to win the CMA award. On the 18th of November 2005, she was invested as an Officer in the Order of Canada. Her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, awarded on the 2nd of June 2011, is the 2,442nd. In 2010 she created Shania Kids Can, a charity for neglected children who are frequently overlooked by social assistance programs. Back in Timmins, the town where she grew up, the city renamed a street for her, gave her the key to the city and built the Shania Twain Centre in her honour.

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