'It was very dangerous and very traumatic for everybody in our house': SHANIA TWAIN on growing up in poverty, her abusive childhood and how bereavement spurred her on to success 

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Back in the spring, Shania Twain took delivery of an enormous bunch of flowers at her home in Switzerland. It was accompanied by a handwritten message, signed ‘Beyoncé’. 

‘It was this lovely note just saying, “Thank you for the inspiration, I listened to your music all through the making of [her new country album] Cowboy Carter”,’ says Twain. ‘So that was very sweet! I wasn’t expecting that.’

These international megastars – Beyoncé, Swift and Twain – they do cross paths at awards ceremonies from time to time. ‘There is definitely a mutual respect among the artists who are prepared to put themselves in a more vulnerable situation – the ones who dare to be different,’ says Twain. 

Still, she had no idea that she had inspired the soul singer to come up with an album of line-dance-ready country pop of the kind that she herself made inescapable in the late 1990s. Indeed, Twain seems faintly surprised that she is here at all. ‘As if I was ever going to make it! I mean, some nobody.’

We’re talking in a suite at a London hotel. The Canadian singer, remarkably fresh-faced at 58, has the air of a dressed-down soccer mom: white hoodie, hair scraped into a loose bun. Still, look closely and those are some serious diamonds in her earrings, testament to her almost indescribable levels of success. 

Twain is not only the bestselling female country artist ever, she is also the creator of the bestselling album by a solo female artist ever, 1997’s Come on Over – 44 million copies. Impress you much?

What’s more, country music is suddenly the sound of 2024. Beyoncé is covering Dolly Parton; Lana Del Rey has moved to Nashville, Gen Z is comparing country divas on TikTok; and line dancing is very much in (see the proof in our fitness feature). ‘It is getting more popular all of a sudden, isn’t it?’ says Twain. ‘I love that! It narrowed for a while, now it’s opening back up. So that’s great!’

Twain is slightly at a loss to explain why – digital-era nostalgia for a rootsier way of being, perhaps? – but is determined to make the most of it. Fresh from Glastonbury, she has a headline date at London’s Hyde Park tonight then, in August, continues her Las Vegas residency – the kind they really do reserve for living legends.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that any of her peers have overcome as much to be on those stages as Twain. 

There was the terrifying period after she contracted Lyme disease in 2003 and thought she would never sing again. There was the painful divorce in 2010 from South African record producer and her long-term collaborator Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange (a marriage that lasted 14 years, producing close to 100 million record sales and a son, Eja, now 22). 

And there were her early years, marked by poverty, sexual and physical abuse, the sudden death of her parents and the responsibility of caring for her orphaned younger siblings. She may only be 58 but it’s not lost on her that 2024 marks her 50th anniversary as a performing artist.

Twain was eight when her mother, Sharon, first made her sing in bars full of drunk ex-miners to earn extra cash. It is not a happy memory. If her songs sound joyful, it’s because she spent years not knowing what joy felt like: she was 31 when she penned ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman’, a massive hit in 1999 and the soundtrack to a million hen parties. ‘I know it’s, like, a classic female-empowerment song. But that wasn’t the intention. It’s really just me going, “S**t!

I missed so much time not enjoying being a woman. What was I waiting for?”’

Christened Eilleen Regina Edwards, Twain grew up in a working-class household in Timmins, northeastern Ontario: a gold-rush-era mining town in economic decline. Her mother Sharon divorced her biological father, Clarence Edwards, when she was two; the surname Twain comes from her stepfather, Jerry Twain, who was of Ojibwa Native American heritage (she changed her name to Shania, Ojibwa for ‘on my way’). 

She and her siblings – half-sister Jill, two years older, and Carrie Ann, three years younger – would soon be joined by half-brother Mark and adopted brother Darryl. There was little work around and no money. Twain’s mother struggled with depression; her stepfather experienced racial discrimination in addition to poverty, and found it a challenge to provide for such a large family. 

‘It was an event in our house to have a grocery day,’ says Twain. ‘Sometimes two to three weeks would go by without groceries. We’d be down to mouldy bread, whatever the absolute bare minimum would be. If there was only mustard in the fridge, we would just put mustard on the bread and take that to school.’ 

They all grew up considering non-bruised apples a luxury. There was violence, too. In her memoir, Twain describes an occasion when Jerry beat Sharon unconscious, then repeatedly plunged her mother’s head in the toilet.

Music became Twain’s escape. ‘That was my playtime, with my guitar.’ (Jerry had taught her to play.) It was also her terror, as her mother began hawking her talented daughter around to earn spare change. There are laws, as you might imagine, against eight-year-olds performing country songs in bars. There are ways around them, too. 

Shania wasn’t allowed to perform while alcohol was being served. But after last orders, between midnight and 1am, shortly after the customers ‘loaded up’ their tables with whisky and beer? That was fine. 

‘It was uncomfortable. It was loud. It was smoky – like, really smoky. Always smelly, you know? Beer and alcohol – stale alcohol.’ On a typical night she would arrive home at 2am and then have to wake up for school four hours later (she’d been through 17 schools by the time she graduated). Winter nights in Ontario can be minus 40.

There was the prospect of a beating should they fail to make enough money to pay for petrol for the car. Sometimes Jerry accompanied them, sometimes he forbade them from going, and sometimes Sharon sneaked her out anyway, which caused problems. 

‘If he had a job and had work the next morning, how was he supposed to get there if we took the gas and I didn’t get paid anything? This was the Russian roulette that my mother was playing at times. That went wrong. Often.’

What would happen?

‘They would get violent. It would be a fight, which was very dangerous and very traumatic for everybody in the house. It was not unusual to have the police show up at the door in the middle of the night. So, yeah! A lot of mixed feelings about my mother wanting to have the next Tanya Tucker!’

Twain also had to contend with the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Jerry from the age of ten, leaving her with what she has described as ‘this cringey horrible wanting to escape being in my own skin’. It doesn’t seem entirely coincidental that ten was also the age when she had started writing songs. ‘Whenever I’m going through something difficult in my life, I tend to process those times through writing.’ She’s not trying to write hits. ‘The purpose, I guess, is the joy and the relief that it brings me. It’s like how kids do colouring.’

You could forgive her for raging and thrashing about her past. Yet she seems incredibly forgiving, of Jerry especially. Was there a period where she was more angry? ‘I’ve been angry… but I’ve always been a very productive person,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had anger issues.’

Is that because she had to be productive? ‘I think it’s my character,’ she counters.

‘I don’t take credit for overcoming anger. I don’t even take credit for not holding a grudge. It’s just part of my character. There were many times when I was a girl or a young woman and intimidated by a man… I didn’t want to go to a bar and sing to a bunch of drunk men. But [even though] I was a child, I wasn’t going to throw a tantrum.’

By the time she left home in 1983, aged 18, Twain had earned a degree of fame on the Canadian country circuit, with fellow singers marvelling at the pain and wisdom in the voice of one so young. 

She began performing with various bands. But even these dreams didn’t last long. In 1987, after gigging in Toronto for three years where she lived with an orchestra-conductor boyfriend, she received the news that Sharon and Jerry had died in a car crash. However much they had wronged her as parents, the loss was deeply painful.

Shania with husband Frédéric, Zürich, 2020

‘When you’ve been through the reality of losing people close to you so shockingly, it stays with you,’ she says. ‘It really can happen any time, anywhere, anyhow.’ There was little choice but to return to Timmins to care for her three younger siblings. 

She had in any case practically been the primary caregiver when her parents were alive. ‘So when my parents died I came back home and kept us together. My older sister had gotten married and started her own family. So, it was the four of us, living together for three years.’ 

Fortunately, she landed a job, performing for decent pay at a local resort, which brought a certain security. By the time her little brothers were ready to move out, she was a seasoned performer.

Stratospheric success would come when Twain teamed up with the in-demand rock producer Mutt Lange (AC/DC, Def Leppard, Bryan Adams) in the mid-90s and formed one of the decade’s most successful musical (and romantic) alliances.  

But up to that point she’d had to figure out everything for herself, she stresses: ‘Do you know how unlikely it is to get a record deal in Nashville as a northern Canadian girl in her late 20s? I was dreaming about the impossible. Ambition implies there’s a plan.’

Lange and Twain met at Nashville’s Fan Fair in July 1993. They were married by the end of December. What most impressed Lange when they first communicated, Twain recalls, was her songwriting. She had, after all, been working on it for nearly two decades. You can hear it in all her huge hits.

‘There’s an authenticity to the writing,’ she says. ‘It comes from my experience. I’m not making light. There is a genuine sincerity. I’m saying a lot. I’m not over it. But I’m dancing around, having fun with it now. I’m free.’

And with time she has found peace. ‘You get older, you look back on it, you go: “Here I am. I’m now the adult, I can express it.” And I can express it with a sense of optimism and humour, even. I’m not fine with it. I wouldn’t want to do it again. But it’s a load off to be able to write it. So that’s how I use my writing. It is very therapeutic.’

She describes a similar movement in her self-image. As a teenager, she felt intensely uncomfortable in her body. ‘From the time I first started seeing my silhouette on camera, I’ve been shedding the shackles of my image insecurities,’ she says. The discreetly placed cowboy hat on the near-nude cover of her recent album, Waking Up Dreaming, is a case in point: ‘The older I get, the better it gets.’

She certainly seems to be over the more recent drama in her life: the breakdown of her marriage to Lange in 2008 when, in a double betrayal, Twain discovered he was having an affair with his secretary and her close friend of nine years, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. (Her first clue was when Thiébaud started cancelling their tennis games.) 

While commiserating with Thiébaud’s husband, Swiss businessman Frédéric, Twain fell in love and they have been together since 2011. He’s ‘the greatest man on the planet’.

Their life in Switzerland sounds idyllic. If she has one extravagance it is horses. ‘I’ve taken a horse with me touring. I own horses. I only need one, right? Right!’ Apart from the horses? ‘We have a very normal home life,’ she insists. 

‘Eja went to normal schools and has friends from all walks of life. There were lots of sleepovers at our place. He’s got a lot of childhood friends still in his daily life. It’s way more stable and functional than my life was. It’s about being grounded as a family.’ 

Which sounds as if she has found a way to make it work with Lange, too. ‘The fact that we’re just both in music and Eja is also in music is very bonding.’ 

So she occasionally picks up the guitars with her ex-husband? 

‘Oh no, Mutt and I don’t work together,’ she says quickly. ‘But Eja and I do. He shares music with his dad. He shares music with me. So even though there was a severance in our work, we all still communicate through music.’ It sounds like a happy ending.  

She has earned it. ‘I just love looking in the mirror now,’ she says before we part. 

‘I’m, like, OK. I’m good. It’s a good feeling.’

Shania Twain performs at BST Hyde Park on Sunday night. Her Come on Over Las Vegas residency continues from 23 August to 14 December.