Everyone loves a winner, a survivor even more. We relate to them; feel we've shared their pain. It's why country music is so popular; its confessional vulnerabilities balanced by resilience and catchy tunes.
With over 100 million albums sold worldwide, Shania Twain remains the top-selling female country artist of all time. When the Canadian-born singer, now 53, plays Glasgow's Hydro next week, it will be the first time she's played in Scotland in a decade and a half.
Back in 2004, following a 96-date tour promoting her Up! album, she disappeared from the public eye for years.
From the outside, things looked good for the five-time Grammy winner. Together with husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange – her collaborator on huge, worldwide hit albums The Woman In Me and Come On Over – she had moved to Switzerland to raise their young son. Up! was indeed uplifting; packed full of big, universal pop songs such as the sassy I'm Gonna Getcha Good! and I'm Not In The Mood (To Say No)!
Was she simply taking some time out to enjoy family life? Was she exhausted, burnt out? We wouldn't know for years.
Until then, we still had the songs – plenty of them. From 1997's 40 million-shifting Come On Over there was You're Still The One and From This Moment On; romantic, triumphal weepies which soundtrack weddings today. There was also That Don't Impress Me Much and Man! I FeelLike a Woman!, brilliantly kitschy pop hits which can raise a smile in even fans of supposedly serious music.
In spring 2008, a spokesman for record label Mercury Nashville announced the couple were separating, after Lange had had an affair with Twain's best friend, Marie-Anne Thiebaud. In a turn of events that reads like a reality TV show, Twain went on to marry Thiebaud's former husband in 2011. That year Twain broke her silence, telling Oprah Winfrey that, not only had she lost her husband and musical partner of 14 years – she had thought she might never sing again.
Diagnosed with Lyme disease and dysphonia, a condition affecting the vocal chords, she must have felt lost.
"My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice," Twain told Winfrey.
In her memoir, also published that year, Twain wrote about her early life in Timmins, Ontario, and how she was singing in bars by the age of eight to help pay the family's bills. How her alcoholic step-father would regularly abuse her mother, and how, as a teenager, she had to abandon an attempt at breaking Nashville to bring up her younger siblings after their parents were killed in a car crash.
It wasn't until earlier this year, in interview ahead of this current tour, that Twain revealed her step-father had also abused her, physically and sexually. In that interview she also claimed she'd have voted for Trump in the 2016 election; something she retracted days after in a series of tweets.
Comeback album Now, is co-produced by Twain herself and features, as you'd perhaps
expect, her most blunt, emotionally honest lyrics yet. Back in the days with Lange, she would write more introspective songs, but keep them from him. Now, it seems, she has nothing to hide, including the effects of age and illness on her voice. That more worldy lower register adds to the sense of plucky optimism on tracks such as Life's About To Get Good and Let's Kiss And Make Up. "Let’s be honest, let’s be open," she sings over the latter's tropical beat. "We’re not broken, not yet".
Sep 19 and 21, SSE Hydro, Glasgow, 6.30pm, £79 to £97. www.thessehydro.com www.shaniatwain.com
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