ShaniaIsALeader
07-02-2003, 04:54 PM
The following article is from Ireland.
I'm On My Way
Sunday June 29th 2003
http://www.unison.ie/images_papers/entertainment/2003-06-29/275940.jpg
CANADA TRY: Young Shania brought mustard sandwiches to school to avoid the humiliation of being seen to have nothing to eat. Now she regularly donates proceeds from shows to charities providing meals for underprivileged children
SHANIA Twain's parents were killed in a car accident in November 1987. A head-on collision with a logging truck on an Ontario highway. It was said that all Jerry and Sharon Twain heard was a horn, and that was it.
"It was the worst time of my life," said Shania.
Still, she couldn't afford to let the grief enfeeble her. Twenty-two years of age, she put her musical career on hold in Toronto and returned to Timmins, her hometown, to look after her younger siblings - her two half-brothers (Mark, then 14, and Darryl, 13), and her sister (Carrie-Ann, 17).
She became their legal guardian and their mother-provider. In reality, this was the same role Shania had been playing since she was 10 years of age - looking after the younger kids while her mother Sharon coped unsuccessfully with her deepening depression.
Her mother started off her life on the wrong foot, says Shania. Her first husband died in a car crash, an ominous tragedy when you consider the grim fate that awaited Sharon and her third husband 25 years later. She was already pregnant with Shania's older half-sister Jill.
"My mom ended up being a single mother from a very young age," says Shania. Their grandmother Eileen was there for them but once she died, she explains. "It all got very difficult after that."
Her mother remarried to Clarence Edwards, a railroad engineer who was committed to a mental institution for a time. "The marriage didn't work. It was a very violent, very dysfunctional relationship," says Shania (who was born Eileen Regina Edwards on August 28, 1965 in Windsor, Ontario). Clarence abandoned the family when she was a young baby. The divorce came through when she was three. Sharon moved with her grandmother and her older sister to Timmins, Ontario.
Three years later, Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa Indian from Timmins. Jerry then adopted her daughter Eileen, changing her name to Eileen Twain. (She adopted the name Shania in 1990: Shania translated from the language of the Ojibwa Indians means, "I'm on my way.")
"So from the age of about two and a half, I had an adopted father, Jerry," she says. "That was the only father I knew. I never knew my other father, anyway. He was probably there for my infancy, but certainly not for when my younger sister was born.
"Then my mother and Jerry had another son several years later and then they adopted another child, my aunt's son. My aunt commited suicide and the child - my adopted brother - was only six months old. So there's four fathers in our family."
If that wasn't turbulent enough, the family's financial circumstances were often uncomfortable - living on the brink of poverty. Jerry Twain, a forester, found regular work hard to come by in Timmins, a gold-mining town 500 miles north of Toronto.
There was no gold in the Twain family; five kids in three rooms, they were - for want of a better word - poor. Food was strictly rationed, if they had it at all. Young Shania brought mustard sandwiches to school in her homemade lunchbox to avoid the humiliation of being seen to have nothing to eat.
Worse, she lived in constant fear that her teachers would find out that her parents couldn't afford to feed her and she'd be taken away by the social services.
"It was very stressful," says the multimillionaire singer, looking back. "I spent a lot of those years really hiding all of that as much as I could.
"That's why I bothered even to take bread to school. Anything - just so there was something in my lunchbag. If we were to have been discovered somehow, at that time the authorities would step in and you got taken away by Children's Aid."
She says her mother didn't explicitly forbid her not to mention their hand-to-mouth existence to anyone in school.
"We just knew. When it's your norm it doesn't seem that weird having nothing at all," she says. "I mean, I hated it. We all hated it. It's funny when you're a family. You just kind of know. If anything, it's the kids that are the gauge of what the norm is, because they're the ones who are going out into the world.
"So, no, there were no discussions about it," she says. "You just know that when you're a kid. There were a few things - like if there was a particularly bad week or whatever, it would be, like: 'Nobody bring anybody home from school. Don't bring your friends over this week.'"
Her stepfather's status as a Native American meant the Twain family could have had special rights. They could have lived on the reservation, she says, and "had a house and had no problem eating and getting clothing".
A proud man, Jerry Twain didn't want his children to grow up like that, "in such a segregated way".
"It's not that Canada didn't have the services to deal with it but our parents just didn't let us fall into that," she says.
"Then we avoided social services too, as far as Children's Aid went. So we ended up getting no help at all. It wasn't the norm, because a lot of other families would just be on welfare. My dad just refused. He just wanted to break that chain because a lot of his own family were on welfare and he didn't want that at all costs."
The cost wasn't just to the children, however. Shania's mother suffered from depression as a result of their situation and some days she would be physically unable to get out of bed. "My mother almost never left the house during a lot of those years," says Shania. "I was her caretaker in a lot of ways, emotionally."
Her childhood equipped her very well for life, she says. "I am not disturbed by any of it, actually. When I was a child, I went through times that - now I look back and realise I must have been depressed during that, but at the time I wasn't thinking that. When you're a kid you're just going through it. And what that type of lifestyle forces you to do is survive, and kids are very resilent. They are quite capable of surviving," she says.
"Whereas my mother was affected very differently - she was quite depressed. One sister left home very, very young. Everybody had a different way of coping with it. I stuck it out more because I felt I had a responsibility. I had that caretaker role in my family because of my mom and because my brothers were still young. I felt I was needed. Because I had music, I think I had the strength to get through it. That was my escape."
And what an escape. Thirty-something Twain is the first female artist in history to have two solo albums - Come on Over and The Woman in Me - sell over 25 million copies each in America alone. But it's much more than mere record sales. She's in possession of an astonishing vocal range. Songs like That Don't Impress Me Much, I'm Not in the Mood [To Say No]! and Man! I Feel Like a Woman imbued country music with a delicious pop sensibility; a sexuality that was scented with a certain lipstick post-feminism.
As she famously sang on That Don't Impress Me Much:
"Okay, so you're Brad Pitt
That don't impress me much.
So you got the looks but have you got the touch?
Don't get me wrong, yeah, I think you're all right,
But that won't keep me warm in the middle of the night . . . "
I ask her if Brad Pitt is a fan of the song.
"I've never met Brad," she smiles. "I wonder what he thinks of it. The song got so much bigger than I would ever have thought, so I'm sure by now he's heard it, at least."
With her bare midriff and barely-there skirts, Shania was the sex-kitten that country music had been secretly waiting for all those years but was scared to acknowledge. She wasted no time in pushing back the boundaries of what was acceptable in that genre.
Princess Diana's favourite photographer Patrick Demarchelier shot Shania for the February cover of Cosmopolitan. She was the first female country artist since Dolly Parton to land the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. FHM magazine once voted her the sexiest woman alive. Young men the world over look at her with the awed intensity of martyrs who have given up their souls to God.
TODAY, in her dressing room scented by Body Shop candles and covered in Conran drapes, Shania looks every inch the off-duty superstar in tracksuit bottoms and runners, hair tied up with a scrunchie. She is smaller than she looks in the videos. I didn't recognise her at first when she walked in.
She is in Dublin to rehearse for a world tour that kicks off next Saturday at the Nowlan Park in Kilkenny. Doubtless the much-anticipated Irish gig, almost sold out already, will be a fantastic evening's entertainment but it possibly won't have the same sleepless edginess as some of her earliest shows.
When Shania was eight years of age, her parents would stir the snoozing child out of bed at midnight to sing with the house band at at Timmins' Mattagami Hotel after the nightly liquor curfew went into effect.
"I wouldn't wait up 'til midnight," she explains. "I would go to bed earlier so I could get some rest and still go to school the next day. I wasn't allowed in the club before midnight so I would do the last set of the night. A lot of clubs would require a female singer because the crowd would be less rough if there was a girl singer."
She was paid €25 a performance. It was good for milk or gas money, she says, but it certainly wasn't going to provide for a family of seven. Her mother's dream in sacrificing Shania's childhood was that she would succeed in life "and break this chain". Sadly, her mother is not around to see that dream fulfilled.
Shania's face blossoms into the sweetest happiness when the subject of her husband, Robert John "Mutt" Lange, comes up. He is probably themost sought-after producer in the music business (AC/DC, Cars, Def Leppard, Foreigner, Bryan Adams, the Corrs and many others). In 1993, he heard about this amazing singer from Canada and contacted her by phone.
They obviously made a connection. They were married in December 1993 - nine months after that first phone call.
"We literally fell in love and got married about three months later," says Shania. "Once we fell in love, we could have got married the next day. The only reason it took three months is because it takes that long to get your livesorganised."
They had their first child, Eja (pronounced "Asia"), on August 12, 2001. "I waited a little bit later in my life to have him," she says. "I sort of avoided it for a long time."
Part of showbusiness's most exclusive social stratum, Shania and Mutt are unlikely to ever let In Style magazine inside their Geneva home.
Her South African husband has been dubbed the Howard Hughes of the music business.
He shuns the limelight and is reputed to have bought up the rights to every photograph of himself ever taken. He has also been described as a total recluse who spends most of his time overseeing his international business affairs from their home in Switzerland.
Shania laughs at this preposterously National Enquirer take on the man she married. He is with her and their child in Dublin, she says. He is publicity-shy but not at all reclusive.
"I'm the recluse!" she laughs. "It's the joke between us. I'm the recluse! I could stay in the same small space for months on end and never see a single person, and would be perfectly fine with that. He can't do that. He's got to be out there exploring. He's got to know what's going on all the time. He has an enquiring mind. He wants to know about people."
Rolling Stone magazine declared earlier this year that the fun-loving persona portrayed on her records doesn't have much to do with Shania Twain herself. The songs that reflect her real emotions, they wrote, she puts away in a box and sometimes doesn't even let her husband listen to them.
Shania thinks this is pitiful psychobabble. "It's all me," she says. "The reality is there's more sides to one person. I'm not just always this bubbly, cheerful, positive, optimistic person, but that's the music that I choose to share with the public. It's as simple as that. For live performance, I just don't want to be in a melancholy mood.
"I want to be cheerful and energetic, and I like sweating up there, and I like having a good time. That's my chance to get up there and party. Maybe that is a reflection of the fact that all my life, my music has been my escape."
"It's not that I'm trying to keep something from the public. I don't have any deep, dark secrets. There's nothing to hide. I'm not proud of where I came from - and I'm not ashamed of where I came from either."
Nor has she forgotten where she came from. She regularly donates proceeds from shows to KidsCafe/Second Harvest Food Bank in the US and the Canadian Living Foundation which provides meals for underprivileged children.
Dressed down in casual clothes - as opposed to her nuclear sex-bomb rig-out - she is understated in more ways than one today. She doesn't ram her rags-to-riches story down your throat. And when she does tell it, it isn't a mawkish Poor Me performance.
"I can't take any credit for surviving it, to be honest with you," she says. "It's as if I had a guide through the whole thing and somehow I just got to the other side. I have always tended to live in the future and I realise now that that's probably why. Tomorrow is another day."
"I have my own philosophies of how to get through life. Time was my only true saviour because time just keeps on going."
Shania Twain plays Nowlan Park, Kilkenny, on Saturday, with Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, Girls Aloud and Denise Hagan. Tickets, €59.50 and €65, are available from Ticketmaster and usual outlets
Barry Egan
I'm On My Way
Sunday June 29th 2003
http://www.unison.ie/images_papers/entertainment/2003-06-29/275940.jpg
CANADA TRY: Young Shania brought mustard sandwiches to school to avoid the humiliation of being seen to have nothing to eat. Now she regularly donates proceeds from shows to charities providing meals for underprivileged children
SHANIA Twain's parents were killed in a car accident in November 1987. A head-on collision with a logging truck on an Ontario highway. It was said that all Jerry and Sharon Twain heard was a horn, and that was it.
"It was the worst time of my life," said Shania.
Still, she couldn't afford to let the grief enfeeble her. Twenty-two years of age, she put her musical career on hold in Toronto and returned to Timmins, her hometown, to look after her younger siblings - her two half-brothers (Mark, then 14, and Darryl, 13), and her sister (Carrie-Ann, 17).
She became their legal guardian and their mother-provider. In reality, this was the same role Shania had been playing since she was 10 years of age - looking after the younger kids while her mother Sharon coped unsuccessfully with her deepening depression.
Her mother started off her life on the wrong foot, says Shania. Her first husband died in a car crash, an ominous tragedy when you consider the grim fate that awaited Sharon and her third husband 25 years later. She was already pregnant with Shania's older half-sister Jill.
"My mom ended up being a single mother from a very young age," says Shania. Their grandmother Eileen was there for them but once she died, she explains. "It all got very difficult after that."
Her mother remarried to Clarence Edwards, a railroad engineer who was committed to a mental institution for a time. "The marriage didn't work. It was a very violent, very dysfunctional relationship," says Shania (who was born Eileen Regina Edwards on August 28, 1965 in Windsor, Ontario). Clarence abandoned the family when she was a young baby. The divorce came through when she was three. Sharon moved with her grandmother and her older sister to Timmins, Ontario.
Three years later, Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa Indian from Timmins. Jerry then adopted her daughter Eileen, changing her name to Eileen Twain. (She adopted the name Shania in 1990: Shania translated from the language of the Ojibwa Indians means, "I'm on my way.")
"So from the age of about two and a half, I had an adopted father, Jerry," she says. "That was the only father I knew. I never knew my other father, anyway. He was probably there for my infancy, but certainly not for when my younger sister was born.
"Then my mother and Jerry had another son several years later and then they adopted another child, my aunt's son. My aunt commited suicide and the child - my adopted brother - was only six months old. So there's four fathers in our family."
If that wasn't turbulent enough, the family's financial circumstances were often uncomfortable - living on the brink of poverty. Jerry Twain, a forester, found regular work hard to come by in Timmins, a gold-mining town 500 miles north of Toronto.
There was no gold in the Twain family; five kids in three rooms, they were - for want of a better word - poor. Food was strictly rationed, if they had it at all. Young Shania brought mustard sandwiches to school in her homemade lunchbox to avoid the humiliation of being seen to have nothing to eat.
Worse, she lived in constant fear that her teachers would find out that her parents couldn't afford to feed her and she'd be taken away by the social services.
"It was very stressful," says the multimillionaire singer, looking back. "I spent a lot of those years really hiding all of that as much as I could.
"That's why I bothered even to take bread to school. Anything - just so there was something in my lunchbag. If we were to have been discovered somehow, at that time the authorities would step in and you got taken away by Children's Aid."
She says her mother didn't explicitly forbid her not to mention their hand-to-mouth existence to anyone in school.
"We just knew. When it's your norm it doesn't seem that weird having nothing at all," she says. "I mean, I hated it. We all hated it. It's funny when you're a family. You just kind of know. If anything, it's the kids that are the gauge of what the norm is, because they're the ones who are going out into the world.
"So, no, there were no discussions about it," she says. "You just know that when you're a kid. There were a few things - like if there was a particularly bad week or whatever, it would be, like: 'Nobody bring anybody home from school. Don't bring your friends over this week.'"
Her stepfather's status as a Native American meant the Twain family could have had special rights. They could have lived on the reservation, she says, and "had a house and had no problem eating and getting clothing".
A proud man, Jerry Twain didn't want his children to grow up like that, "in such a segregated way".
"It's not that Canada didn't have the services to deal with it but our parents just didn't let us fall into that," she says.
"Then we avoided social services too, as far as Children's Aid went. So we ended up getting no help at all. It wasn't the norm, because a lot of other families would just be on welfare. My dad just refused. He just wanted to break that chain because a lot of his own family were on welfare and he didn't want that at all costs."
The cost wasn't just to the children, however. Shania's mother suffered from depression as a result of their situation and some days she would be physically unable to get out of bed. "My mother almost never left the house during a lot of those years," says Shania. "I was her caretaker in a lot of ways, emotionally."
Her childhood equipped her very well for life, she says. "I am not disturbed by any of it, actually. When I was a child, I went through times that - now I look back and realise I must have been depressed during that, but at the time I wasn't thinking that. When you're a kid you're just going through it. And what that type of lifestyle forces you to do is survive, and kids are very resilent. They are quite capable of surviving," she says.
"Whereas my mother was affected very differently - she was quite depressed. One sister left home very, very young. Everybody had a different way of coping with it. I stuck it out more because I felt I had a responsibility. I had that caretaker role in my family because of my mom and because my brothers were still young. I felt I was needed. Because I had music, I think I had the strength to get through it. That was my escape."
And what an escape. Thirty-something Twain is the first female artist in history to have two solo albums - Come on Over and The Woman in Me - sell over 25 million copies each in America alone. But it's much more than mere record sales. She's in possession of an astonishing vocal range. Songs like That Don't Impress Me Much, I'm Not in the Mood [To Say No]! and Man! I Feel Like a Woman imbued country music with a delicious pop sensibility; a sexuality that was scented with a certain lipstick post-feminism.
As she famously sang on That Don't Impress Me Much:
"Okay, so you're Brad Pitt
That don't impress me much.
So you got the looks but have you got the touch?
Don't get me wrong, yeah, I think you're all right,
But that won't keep me warm in the middle of the night . . . "
I ask her if Brad Pitt is a fan of the song.
"I've never met Brad," she smiles. "I wonder what he thinks of it. The song got so much bigger than I would ever have thought, so I'm sure by now he's heard it, at least."
With her bare midriff and barely-there skirts, Shania was the sex-kitten that country music had been secretly waiting for all those years but was scared to acknowledge. She wasted no time in pushing back the boundaries of what was acceptable in that genre.
Princess Diana's favourite photographer Patrick Demarchelier shot Shania for the February cover of Cosmopolitan. She was the first female country artist since Dolly Parton to land the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. FHM magazine once voted her the sexiest woman alive. Young men the world over look at her with the awed intensity of martyrs who have given up their souls to God.
TODAY, in her dressing room scented by Body Shop candles and covered in Conran drapes, Shania looks every inch the off-duty superstar in tracksuit bottoms and runners, hair tied up with a scrunchie. She is smaller than she looks in the videos. I didn't recognise her at first when she walked in.
She is in Dublin to rehearse for a world tour that kicks off next Saturday at the Nowlan Park in Kilkenny. Doubtless the much-anticipated Irish gig, almost sold out already, will be a fantastic evening's entertainment but it possibly won't have the same sleepless edginess as some of her earliest shows.
When Shania was eight years of age, her parents would stir the snoozing child out of bed at midnight to sing with the house band at at Timmins' Mattagami Hotel after the nightly liquor curfew went into effect.
"I wouldn't wait up 'til midnight," she explains. "I would go to bed earlier so I could get some rest and still go to school the next day. I wasn't allowed in the club before midnight so I would do the last set of the night. A lot of clubs would require a female singer because the crowd would be less rough if there was a girl singer."
She was paid €25 a performance. It was good for milk or gas money, she says, but it certainly wasn't going to provide for a family of seven. Her mother's dream in sacrificing Shania's childhood was that she would succeed in life "and break this chain". Sadly, her mother is not around to see that dream fulfilled.
Shania's face blossoms into the sweetest happiness when the subject of her husband, Robert John "Mutt" Lange, comes up. He is probably themost sought-after producer in the music business (AC/DC, Cars, Def Leppard, Foreigner, Bryan Adams, the Corrs and many others). In 1993, he heard about this amazing singer from Canada and contacted her by phone.
They obviously made a connection. They were married in December 1993 - nine months after that first phone call.
"We literally fell in love and got married about three months later," says Shania. "Once we fell in love, we could have got married the next day. The only reason it took three months is because it takes that long to get your livesorganised."
They had their first child, Eja (pronounced "Asia"), on August 12, 2001. "I waited a little bit later in my life to have him," she says. "I sort of avoided it for a long time."
Part of showbusiness's most exclusive social stratum, Shania and Mutt are unlikely to ever let In Style magazine inside their Geneva home.
Her South African husband has been dubbed the Howard Hughes of the music business.
He shuns the limelight and is reputed to have bought up the rights to every photograph of himself ever taken. He has also been described as a total recluse who spends most of his time overseeing his international business affairs from their home in Switzerland.
Shania laughs at this preposterously National Enquirer take on the man she married. He is with her and their child in Dublin, she says. He is publicity-shy but not at all reclusive.
"I'm the recluse!" she laughs. "It's the joke between us. I'm the recluse! I could stay in the same small space for months on end and never see a single person, and would be perfectly fine with that. He can't do that. He's got to be out there exploring. He's got to know what's going on all the time. He has an enquiring mind. He wants to know about people."
Rolling Stone magazine declared earlier this year that the fun-loving persona portrayed on her records doesn't have much to do with Shania Twain herself. The songs that reflect her real emotions, they wrote, she puts away in a box and sometimes doesn't even let her husband listen to them.
Shania thinks this is pitiful psychobabble. "It's all me," she says. "The reality is there's more sides to one person. I'm not just always this bubbly, cheerful, positive, optimistic person, but that's the music that I choose to share with the public. It's as simple as that. For live performance, I just don't want to be in a melancholy mood.
"I want to be cheerful and energetic, and I like sweating up there, and I like having a good time. That's my chance to get up there and party. Maybe that is a reflection of the fact that all my life, my music has been my escape."
"It's not that I'm trying to keep something from the public. I don't have any deep, dark secrets. There's nothing to hide. I'm not proud of where I came from - and I'm not ashamed of where I came from either."
Nor has she forgotten where she came from. She regularly donates proceeds from shows to KidsCafe/Second Harvest Food Bank in the US and the Canadian Living Foundation which provides meals for underprivileged children.
Dressed down in casual clothes - as opposed to her nuclear sex-bomb rig-out - she is understated in more ways than one today. She doesn't ram her rags-to-riches story down your throat. And when she does tell it, it isn't a mawkish Poor Me performance.
"I can't take any credit for surviving it, to be honest with you," she says. "It's as if I had a guide through the whole thing and somehow I just got to the other side. I have always tended to live in the future and I realise now that that's probably why. Tomorrow is another day."
"I have my own philosophies of how to get through life. Time was my only true saviour because time just keeps on going."
Shania Twain plays Nowlan Park, Kilkenny, on Saturday, with Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, Girls Aloud and Denise Hagan. Tickets, €59.50 and €65, are available from Ticketmaster and usual outlets
Barry Egan