Shania Twain On Being Respected And Finding Her Voice 'Now'
It's striking to think of someone in the position of Shania Twain, one of the biggest and most buoyant pop divas of her generation, feeling like her voice has been marginalized, much less silenced altogether. Even so, claiming and reclaiming her agency has been a theme throughout her career. Media coverage of the country-pop crossover superstar — one of the most commercially successful artists of the 1990s — sometimes presented a gendered and rockist read of her dynamic with her then-husband, famed rock producer Mutt Lange, despite the fact that both he and Twain constantly made it clear that they were equal partners in the studio.
Nearly a decade ago, when Twain's partnership with Lange was dissolving amid allegations of his infidelity, she found herself stripped of the ability to sing altogether, due to what would eventually be diagnosed as nerve damage to her vocal cords brought on by Lyme disease. With musical expression unavailable to her, she resisted retreating into private anguish, and found outlets in a soul-searching reality television show and a memoir. Her journey to recover her voice, as she describes it, reaches its culmination in her new album, Now.
Singing never used to seem effortful for Twain. Any attention devoted to
