Shania Twain gets emotional as she opens up about her struggles with Lyme disease and dysphonia, revealing how another music legend Lionel Ritchie saved her.
Shania Twain’s Lyme Disease
The Grammy Award winning superstar sat down with Dan Rather, where she opened up about how her Lyme disease diagnosis nearly ended her career.
“Singing is a part of, it’s a joy that was gone,” she shared, revealing that her Lyme disease led to dysphonia. “Dysphonia is really a very general term, and it’s just the inability to phonate desirably or the way you would have or like a disrupted phonation, right? A disruption of some kind in how you would normally make sounds and voice things.”
The former “The Voice” advisor added, “So any disruption there as a singer is devastating and career-ending, you know, potentially.”
Twain revealed that she could not sing “what [she] wanted at will” for “seven years.”
“There would be moments when it would come out properly, and then the next minute it wouldn’t. It was just unpredictable. So I could go into a studio and maybe record. I had to do a couple of isolated things,” she explained, calling the situation “humiliating.”
After seven years of struggles and heartbreak, Twain decided to hang up her microphone and pivot fully to songwriting.
“I thought I would never again have a musical career, not in singing,” she shared. “I would continue to be a songwriter and I would write for other people. I took the positive outlook and was happy thinking well I’ll write songs for sother people and my I will live vicariously through other singers, and my music will still carry on.”
It would be another seven years of therapies, scientific and medical exploration, and “[connecting] the dots between the dysphonia and the issues with phonating properly and the Lyme’s disease.”
How Lionel Ritchie Saves Shania Twain
In 2012, Ritchie approached Twain with a request to duet on his song “Endless Love,” which she originally turned down.
“I’m like, I can’t do it. There’s no way I can stand in front of you and go through that humiliating experience,” she explained to Rather. “I felt like he was just going to think I was lame, and I was too insecure.”
After some persistence from her husband, Twain agreed to revisit the conversation with Ritchie.
“So, he pursued it and saved that song for me. It was my husband that convinced me, and he said, ‘Listen, it’s not going to kill you to just get on the phone with him. Just talk to him. At least tell him no, you know, personally on the phone.'”
However, it was Ritchie’s support and kindness that led Twain to reconsider.
“I did say no, but I was saying no with a lot less conviction than what I was telling my husband, and Lionel talked me into it,” she laughed. “[Ritchie] was wonderful, more wonderful in person than he was over the phone. And he really just held my hand through it and got me through it. But the physical and psychological preparation to deliver a vocal like that even though it made it possible to deliver a good vocal, I knew that I couldn’t sustain that on a daily basis in a career basis where you have to get up and do that every day. So I was encouraged knowing that I still had it in there somewhere.”
The following summer, Twain announced she was working on a new album. She later embarked on her first tour in more than a decade in 2015, and is still touring today.
“At this point in my life, I see it more as something I will enjoy more than I ever have,” she told Rather.
