Shania Twain not only lost husband, but also voice

LOS ANGELES - COUNTRY singer Shania Twain said on Tuesday that she was so shattered by the collapse of her marriage that she feared she would never sing again. In her first TV interview in five years, Twain told Oprah Winfrey that she became 'an emotional mess' when she found out in 2008 that her best friend and her husband had fallen for each other.

'I figured mentally that I would never sing again,' the five-time Grammy Award winner told Winfrey. Twain said she not only lost her husband, but also her producer and co-writer when she split with Robert John 'Mutt' Lange. 'I hadn't written a song without this man in 14 years...How do I even get started?' she said in an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Twain, whose 1997 album Come On Over was a huge crossover hit, revealed that she also suffers from dysphonia, an ailment where the muscles squeeze the voice box. 'My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice,' Twain told Winfrey. 'I was losing it slowly and progressively.'

Twain chronicles the demise of her 14-year marriage and her fight to get her voice back in a new book From This Moment On and a documentary series Why Not? that debuts on Sunday on Winfrey's cable TV network OWN.

In her memoir and TV documentary, the Canadian singer recounts how she grew up poor and witnessed her step-father physically abuse her mother on a regular basis only to see them both die in a car accident, leaving Twain to raise her siblings.

Twain called her husband's betrayal 'a trigger crisis,' and 'the straw that broke the camel's back of something that had already been building.' Eventually, Twain found solace with Frederic Thiebaud, the husband of the woman who was once her best friend. The two married on Jan 1. -- REUTERS

Shania Twain

 Shania Twain is a Canadian country pop singer-songwriter. She rose to fame in the mid 1990s with her album The Woman in Me, and achieved worldwide success with her album Come On Over, which became the best-selling album of all time by a female musician in any genre, and the best-selling country album of all time. It has sold over 40 million copies worldwide and is the 9th best-selling album in the U.S.

A five-time Grammy Award winner, Twain has also achieved major success as a songwriter, winning 27 BMI Songwriter awards. Twain is one of the first country artists to achieve major crossover success in pop music. She is the only female musician to have three albums certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America and is also the second best-selling artist in Canada, behind fellow Canadian Céline Dion, with three of her studio albums being certified double diamond by the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Twain has sold over 76 million albums worldwide, including 49 million in the U.S. She is ranked as the 10th best-selling artist of the Nielsen Sound Scan era, with approximately 34 million in sales through April 2008. She was also ranked the 72nd Artist of the 2000–10 decade by Billboard.Most recently, Twain will have her own series, Why Not? with Shania Twain, that is set to premiere on the OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network on May 9, 2011.

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