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Shania Twain feared she would “never get over” her divorce.
The That Don’t Impress Me Much singer split from first husband Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange in 2008 after he had an affair with her best friend, Marie-Anne Thiebaud, and she recalled how the grief from their marriage ending left her feeling as low as she did when her parents died in a car crash in 1987.
She said: “When I lost Mutt, I guess I thought…I was thinking that the grief of that was… It was similarly intense to losing my parents. And you know, it was like a death.
“It was like the death was the end, a permanent end to so many facets of my life. And I never got over my parents’ death. So I’m thinking, ‘S***, I’m never going to get over this.’ Like…how do you get over that?
“So all I can do is determine how I’m going to carry on from there. How am I going to crawl out of this hole that I’ve fallen in? Just like that, you know?”
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The end of her marriage came after the Forever and Always hitmaker – who went on to marry Marie-Anne’s husband Frederic Thiebaud in 2011 – was afraid she’d never sing again after contracting Lyme disease when she was bitten by a tick while out horse riding in 2003.
Speaking in her new Netflix documentary Not Just a Girl, she said: “The tick was infected with Lyme disease, and I did get Lyme disease.
“My symptoms were quite scary because before I was diagnosed, I was on stage very dizzy. I was losing my balance, I was afraid I was gonna fall off the stage… I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds.
“My voice was never the same again. I thought I’d lost my voice forever. I thought that was it, (and) I would never, ever sing again.”
Shania – who has son Aja, 20, with Mutt – admitted she reached a point where she considered giving up her career.
She said: “In that search to determine what was causing this lack of control with my voice and this change in my voice, I was facing a divorce. My husband leaves me for another woman.
“Now I’m at a whole other low. And I just don’t see any point in going on with a music career.”
But the Still the One hitmaker eventually went back to work but admitted she was “petrified” about returning to the studio without Mutt, her former producer, by her side.
Reflecting on her 2017 album Now, she said: “It took a long time to be ready to write and record again.
“It was really more about taking independence, (and) just being able to listen to myself back on my writing tapes was difficult… It was an exercise of saying, ‘OK, look, you can’t just not ever make music again because you don’t have Mutt. You gotta just dive in.’ And I was petrified, I really was.
“So now I said, ‘OK listen, I’m going to not only get back into the studio without him, I’m going to write all the music alone, and just discover myself again as individual creative, like I’d been all of my youth.'”
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