For seven years, the woman behind Come On Over, which the Global Lyme Alliance calls the best-selling female album ever, could not yell out for her own dog.
“There were seven years where I could not, for example, yell out for my dog. My voice would just cut out in certain places,” Shania Twain said on ABC’s The View in 2020.
Fans have wondered for a long time what happened to Shania Twain, and the answer is that she lost two things within a few years of each other. A tick bit her while she was horseback riding in 2003, and the Lyme disease that followed left her unable to perform. Then her husband, Robert “Mutt” Lange, left her for her best friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud.
On New Year’s Day 2011, Twain married Frédéric Thiébaud in Puerto Rico. He is Marie-Anne’s ex-husband. According to Hello magazine, Twain has tied the 15 years she kept a low profile to those two losses, the end of her marriage and the loss of her singing voice.
A Tick Bite in 2003 Started Taking Shania Twain’s Voice
She was at the very top when it happened. The Global Lyme Alliance notes that she is a Grammy winner, that Come On Over is the best-selling album ever by a female artist, and that she is the only artist with three diamond albums. She played the Super Bowl halftime show in early 2003, and that same year, a ride on horseback ended with a tick bite.
In the three weeks between the bite and the start of treatment, it caused nerve damage that affected her vocal cords. Before her diagnosis, according to the website of Dr. Daniel Cameron, she had dizziness, loss of balance and brief blackouts while she was performing.
She told that part of the story in her Netflix documentary, Not Just a Girl, and said she was so dizzy on stage that she was afraid she was going to fall off it. Even after the diagnosis, the answer about her voice took longer. She said on The View that it took several years for doctors to connect her voice problems to Lyme disease.
After the Up! tour in 2004, she all but disappeared. Her break from music lasted until 2017, and it came from vocal issues caused by the disease.
“I thought I would never sing again,” she said in Not Just a Girl.
Seven plain words hold everything a singer can lose.
Shania Twain Learned About the Affair When Mutt Lange Filed for Divorce
Her marriage was the other half of the story. Twain and Lange were married from 1993 to 2008, and their son, Eja, was born in 2001. They separated in May 2008, and she did not know about the affair until he filed for divorce.
“I thought that marriage was forever. I really, really believed that,” she told the Sun.
After the divorce, she could not bring herself to sing “You’re Still the One,” the hit about a love that lasts. The voice Lyme disease had damaged now had a broken heart to carry too.
The one person who knew exactly what that betrayal felt like was the other person it happened to. Frédéric Thiébaud, a Nestlé executive who runs the brand’s operations in Switzerland, had been married to Marie-Anne. On the Armchair Expert podcast in 2023, Twain called Fred one of the smartest people she knows and said he did not know about the affair either.
“That helped me feel better. Neither of us saw it coming,” she said.
Twain became stepmother to his daughter, Johanna. She revealed in 2023 that Lange and Marie-Anne are still together, and on that same podcast, she said she and Lange parent well together for two people who do not talk to each other. That sentence carries a lot of hard years in it, and it still puts their son first.
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Shania Twain Rode Back Onto the Stage in Las Vegas With 40 Horses
Hardship was nothing new to her. Long before Lyme disease or the divorce, she survived a childhood of poverty and abuse and raised her siblings after her parents died. In Not Just a Girl, she said that being relentless is the only way, and she went after her voice with that same stubbornness.
She did not hide the struggle. She documented it in the 2011 OWN series Why Not? With Shania Twain, and then she announced her return at a press conference in Nashville.
The Caesars Palace residency announcement was pure Shania. She rode down the Las Vegas Strip with a herd of 40 horses and nine wranglers while police held traffic for about 30 minutes, and “Still the One” was playing as she stepped onto the stage. The residency carried that name too, the song she once could not bring herself to sing.
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Drivers held in that traffic were waiting on a woman who once believed she would never sing again.
One onlooker, Steve Huffman, told The Associated Press at the event that he could either lose a few hundred dollars inside or come out and see what kind of spectacle she put on.
Twain was open about why Las Vegas made sense. When she announced the residency, she said it was great for her voice to be stabilized in an environment she could control, which she appreciated with all her Lyme disease voice issues, and that she would take a steam shower every night as she started her warmups before the show.
Shania Twain Had Open-Throat Surgery While She Was Awake
The records came back too. Her hiatus ended in 2017 with Now, an album she wrote and recorded largely on her own, according to Dr. Cameron’s site, though her voice is different from the one fans first fell for.
She told the Sun that after surviving all of that, the last thing she wanted at that point in her life was to rely on somebody else to take such a huge step with her. After the years she had just come through, the next step was going to be hers.
In 2018, according to Dr. Cameron’s site, she had open-throat surgery to improve how her vocal folds worked. Dr. Cameron’s site notes that she stayed awake for it so she could sing while the surgeons assessed her voice.
She is still on the biggest stages there are, and she sang at Wembley on June 29, 2026. Somewhere along the way, she made peace with the voice that came back.
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“I have a different voice now but I own it. I love my voice now,” she said on The View in 2020.
For seven years she could not yell out for her own dog, and now that voice, different and fully hers, carries across Wembley.
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