Shania Twain says she has thought about the day when she can no longer sing.
“I'll just find other people to sing my songs,” she told InStyle. “That’s the way I look at it. I'll just find other voices that are even better than mine. I will be sad to lose that expression, but I know I've done everything I can, so it won't devastate me in that sense. I know that I persevered.”
The 57-year-old Canadian superstar said after losing her singing voice due to Lyme disease, she underwent two “open-throat” surgeries.
“After I had the surgery, I was petrified to make a sound. I didn't know what was going to come out," she recalled. “It did scare me, but I just had to take the leap and make a sound. And I was so excited about what came out.”
Twain's struggle to regain her voice was documented in the 2011 series Why Not? With Shania Twain. In 2020, she admitted "there was a long time I thought I would never sing again" and she said "there were days I didn’t really care if tomorrow came."
Twain said her voice today is different than it was on her early recordings.
“It's easier for me to make loud sounds than it is to make soft sounds,” she explained. “When the air is dry, it's harder to get that resonance. When I'm loud, it happens, which was the opposite problem before I got the surgery.”
Twain’s fears about her voice came up more recently during “a very bad battle with COVID” in which her lungs filled up “with COVID pneumonia and I was losing my air.” She said things were so “iffy” that she reminded herself not to take time for granted.
“It's possible I might lose it, that it may not last,” she said of her voice. “It could happen.”
Twain embarks on a tour in late April in support of her forthcoming album Queen of Me, out Feb. 3. It includes 26 shows in Canada.