She’s still the one! Shania Twain is releasing her first new album in 15 years, and she revealed to Rolling Stone that some of the songs are inspired by her messy divorce from her producer and husband Robert “Mutt” Lange.
The track “Who’s Gonna Be Your Girl?” hints at why their marriage broke down. “It’s about feeling unappreciated and knowing that you are secondary,” she told Us Weekly’s sister magazine. “Having to live with someone that has different priorities and accepting that you’re not the most important thing in a person’s life.”
As fans may remember, music industry heavyweight Lange, 68, abruptly left Twain, 51, for her former best friend Marie-Anne Thiebaud in May 2008. The couples essentially swapped when, soon after the split, the country star was spotted with Marie-Anne’s ex-husband Frederic Thiebaud. The “You’re Still the One” singer and Frederic confirmed their romance in 2009 and wed two years later. (Twain and Lange share a 15-year-old son, Eja.)
Twain, who wrote all the new music herself, has been working on the project for years, and her progress was further complicated by her vocal chord disorder, dysphonia, which altered her signature voice. “I’m a different singer now,” she said. “There was a lot of coming to terms with that. It’s been one of the obstacles in my life I’ve just had to learn to live with.”
The five-time Grammy winner (one of the best-selling artists of all time) put her emotions from overcoming the obstacles into her still-untitled album (the followup to her fourth album, 2002’s Up), which she hopes to release in May. “It needed to be really pure and my own story and my own emotional journey,” she said. “I was now alone all of a sudden, and I didn’t want to shy away from it. And that’s not a collaborative things; it’s a very personal thing.”
Twain said writing songs was “therapy” and the whole process was cathartic. “It helped me come to terms with a lot of things emotionally,” she said. “It’s sort of like when you finish crying. When you’re done, you’re done and you move on.”
