Shania Twain is opening up about success despite facing "devastating" challenges.
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Twain reflects on losing her mom and stepfather when she was just 22. Twain was left having to take care of her siblings.
"I had to learn how to be brave really early on and not crumble," she said. Then she nearly lost her voice, needing vocal cord surgery due to Lyme disease. "I've gotten through difficult times by being capable of finding courage, being brave and pushing through the fear. Fear fuels me."
But despite all of this, Twain says that she looks back on her life with a smile.
"I've already spent all of my life processing the challenges [I've had]," she says. "I'm at a place where I really enjoy looking back on it with a smile."
Additionally, Twain opened up about working with Tanya Tucker, a personal hero of hers when she was a child.
Shania Twain Reflects Back
"Tanya Tucker was the only child star at the time in country music [when I was growing up], so that was my mother's reference for who she believed I could be. I never did become a child star — I wouldn't be successful till long after my mother was already gone — but I was thinking about her when I wrote that song, as I'm looking back on where I come from, the feelings and experiences of my youth and how she was my manager, my agent, my coach," Twain says. "I was 'Little Miss Twain' with a huge guitar singing in bars. Tanya understood that my mother had big dreams for me and that they were coming true in such a literal way in that moment of recording with her."
Twain said that her life challenges have inspired her new music.
"I grew up really quickly. We didn't always have money to pay the bills. I was one of the adults: getting the kids to school, making meals out of nothing — whatever was left in jars, like ketchup sandwiches — and trying to support my mother through her depression and not being able to feed us or not being able to keep us warm in the winter. She was a wonderful mother, but she couldn't cope with not always being able to care for us the way she believed we should be cared for," Twain says. "My music was her lifeline a lot of the time. It gave her hope that we could maybe become the Beverly Hillbillies."
