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Courtney3302 · Senior Member

Shania - Lyme Disease?

Tommy · Guru

Apparently Lyme disease caused her vocal problems. It was in last week's Los Angeles Times article.

'Life's About to Get Good' for Shania Twain with new album, Stagecoach appearance

By Randy Lewis | Los Angeles Times | April 25, 2017

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The name of Vincent Van Gogh probably isn’t one that springs to mind for most people in connection with pop-country superstar Shania Twain.

But the Canadian singer and songwriter feels a special connection with the 19th century post-Impressionist painter in terms of how she’s gone about writing the songs for her first new album in more than a dozen years, one that she’ll preview this weekend during her headlining set Saturday at the 2017 edition of the Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio.

Relaxing on the sofa in her Beverly Hills hotel room last week during a bit of downtime between rehearsals for that performance, which serves a key role of the grand rollout of her return to the pop spotlight this year, Twain made a comparison between the process her songs went through and Van Gogh’s methodology in his famous “Wheat Fields” series of dozens of paintings of haystacks.

“Look at how many of those there are,” she said with a combination of excitement and curiosity. “There are all these different lights—some are dark, some are bright, some show different times of day, some are foggy. Why would somebody paint the same painting over and over and over again?

“He had to go through that same experience over and over and over again,” she said, answering her own question. “Some paintings are just not done until they’re done. They’ve got to paint that subject out of their system. And that’s what I had to do. These songs just evolved. They started one place and ended in another. “

Her new album won’t surface until the fall, and at this point still doesn’t even have a title. It’s being scheduled for release during the all-important fourth quarter period during which the music industry sees its biggest sales, and consequently holds back its biggest guns for that time.

Twain’s album will test to what extent she retains the commercial power she held as the biggest female country star of the 1990s and early 2000s, and who was rivaled for a time perhaps only by Garth Brooks as the most potent pop star in the world.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America has certified her album sales at 48 million in the U.S. alone, and her biggest seller, 1997’s “Come On Over,” has logged hearly half that figure on its own: 20 million copies, placing it among the Top 10 biggest selling albums of all time.

Her show at Stagecoach is a coup for festival organizers, who say they’ve had their sights on her since the event began a decade ago.

“The fact that she was offered it [a headlining slot] says a lot in itself,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert-industry-tracking publication. “It’s a good move for Stagecoach--It adds a little freshness, and that’s what they need for shows like that. She’s not been around a lot, so there are a lot of people who haven’t seen her for a long time.

That’s because Twain had stepped out of the limelight when Stagecoach was born in 2007. Having survived the tragedy of her parents’ death in an automobile accident when she was a young adult, Twain, who was born Eilleen Regina Edwards on Aug. 28, 1965 in Windsor, Ontario, suffered another round of personal and professional setbacks in the new millennium that once again left her reeling.

Her high-profile marriage to longtime producer and frequent songwriting partner Robert John “Mutt” Lange disintegrated after he allegedly had an affair with her best friend, and they divorced in 2010 after 17 years together. She told Billboard at the time she didn’t know whether she’d ever be able to perform again, so closely were she and Lange involved with her music career.

She also developed problems with her voice, a condition known as dysphonia that can be brought on by stress, but which she attributed to contracting Lyme disease.

Whatever the cause, it left her for a time virtually unable to sing. She went through extensive physical therapy for her voice, and now continues an intense regimen of warmup and other voice-strengthening exercises that allowed her to accept an offer from Caesar’s Palace to launch a residency at the Colosseum that ran from 2012 to 2014.

A singer’s typical problem is nodules on the vocal cords from overuse or poor technique,” she said. “That was not my problem. My problem isn’t unique, or rare, but the exercises are very different than for nodules, and I can’t get an operation for mine. The only way to fix it is to work hard.

“With nodules you can’t speak; you’ve got to rest, rest, rest,” she said. “With mine, you’ve got to work, work, work.” Then she laughed again. “I know, I know.”

From her experience doing the “Still the One” residency in Las Vegas, she said, “I learned a lot about myself, and my voice,” from the “Still the One” residency in Las Vegas, she said, “both because I’d been having a lot of problems with my voice prior and because this was a real plunge into the unknown.”

The big question?

“Was I going to be able to hold up?” she said. “The environment is very dry there, and it’s very, very hard on a voice. A lot of singers have problems there. And there’s the discipline required for doing a show like that ever night.

“This is why I ended up going on a tour [the “Rock This Country” tour in 2015-2016] after that, because I thought, ‘Wow, I can do this!’ If I can do it here, I can do it anywhere,” she said, bursting into laughter at her spontaneous allusion to the Frank Sinatra late-career anthem “New York, New York.” “It gave me courage to do more shows and get out on the road again. It was a good test for me.”

In fact, that tour brought her back into the Top 10 of Pollstar’s ranking of the highest-grossing North American concert tours of the year. In 2015, she grossed $69 million from 72 shows in 56 cities, including dates at Staples Center in L.A. and the Honda Center in Anaheim.

“Her business was generally very good,” Bongiovanni said, “although not all her shows were sellouts….At one time she was one of the top acts in country music, and then she went away for a while. Now a whole other groups of acts that have come along.”

Having passed the test of whether she could still endure the rigors of touring, and having stabilized her personal life and remarrying in 2011—to Frederic Thiebaud, the ex-husband of her former best friend---Twain gave herself another challenge: to write all the songs for her next album on her own. After the soul-searching she did while writing her 2012 autobiography, “From This Moment On,” she had no shortage of raw material to draw from.

“Right from the beginning, I was not going to collaborate with anybody for this one,” she said. “This needed to be an independent experience.

“I hadn’t written by myself for a long time,” she said. “I was married for 14 years to my collaborator, and I really just needed to do that again. I needed to go back and do that by myself and have an uninterrupted flow of creativity that was insular, to see what I was made of, to see what I have there.”

What she found translates as painfully vulnerable in places, commandingly resilient in others, happily grateful elsewhere. (“You let me go/You had to have her/You told me so/I died faster,” she sings in “I’m Alright.”)

The solo approach was limited, however, to her songwriting. In place of Lange’s production, which had also played a key role in her commercial success by bringing a sonic edge from his hard rock background into the world of country music, she has teamed with a variety of different co-producers for most of the new tracks.

Yet the new songs largely extend, rather than dramatically break from, the sound and style that kept her atop the charts for an extended period with a string of No. 1 country hits including “Any Man of Mine,” “You Win My Love,” “Honey, I’m Home” and “You’re Still the One.”

She hadn’t settled firmly on which new songs she’ll unveil this weekend at Stagecoach, but said the prime contenders are “Swingin’” and “Life’s About to Get Good,” both of which are full of the lyrical and melodic hooks she’s specialized in all along.

She said that “Life’s About To Get Good” was a textbook example of the reward she gets out of writing songs.

“I was thinking ‘OK, what is life about?’ I was being kind of serious; I was reflecting: Life’s about joy, life’s about pain, life’s about this, life’s about that,” she said. “Then all of a sudden: ‘Life’s about to get good.’ And I thought, ‘What a great play on words! How fun is that? Who uses ‘about’ as a play on words? I’m sure no one’s ever written that before and I was all excited.

“I was getting satisfaction out of [considering] aspects of life and what it’s all about, then I have this really cool artistic moment--a writer’s thing, like ‘Oh, yeah, that’s really good, that’s a great twist’,” she said. “When those things come together, it’s all very satisfying. That is where the craft of writing comes in, the more soulful purpose of the meaning of the song comes out.”

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-shania-twain-stagecoach-new-album-20170425-story.html

Tommy · Guru

What The Health?! Can Lyme disease really cause you to lose your voice?

By Gail Johnson | Yahoo Canada Style | June 28, 2019

Shania Twain has opened up about her experience with Lyme disease and how it stole her voice.

The singer behind hits like “Man! Feel Like a Woman!” and “You’re Still the One” told Extra she was bitten by a tick in Norfolk, Va. in 2003 and contracted the disease.

She found herself facing dysphonia, an imbalance in the coordination of the muscles and breathing patterns needed to create voice.

“I had to have an operation that was very intense and it’s an open-throat operation, very different from a vocal cord operation,” Twain said. “I had to have two of them, so that was really, really, really tough, and I survived that, meaning emotionally I survived, and am just ready to keep going.”

“When you’re a singer and it’s your voice, it is just a terrible, terrible feeling,” she added. “It was a great, great loss, so I had to come to terms with losing the voice that I had and rediscovering my new one.”

Lyme disease is acquired from a bite by a black-legged tick infected with the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium. Ticks can attach to any part of the body, but are often found in hard-to-see areas such as the groin, armpits, and scalp.

Dysphonia is just one way that Lyme disease can manifest. Untreated, the condition can cause a wide range of symptoms.

Early signs—three to 30 days after a bite—include fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some people get what’s called an “erythema migrans” (EM) rash, which appears, on average, seven days after a bite and expands gradually over a period of days reaching up to 12 inches or more (30 cm) across. It’s rarely painful or itchy but can feel warm to the touch; sometimes it looks like a target or bullseye.” A rash related to Lyme disease, however, can have other appearances, if it shows up at all.

Later symptoms, which can appear days or months after a bite, include severe headaches and neck stiffness; other EM rashes on other parts of the body; arthritis with severe joint pain and swelling, particularly the knees and other large joints; loss of muscle tone or droop on one or both sides of the face, called facial palsy; and intermittent pain in tendons, muscles, joints, and bones.

Still other signs are heart palpitations or an irregular heart beat (Lyme carditis), dizziness, shortness of breath, nerve pain, inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, numbness or tingling in the hands or feet, and short-term memory problems.

Because it can have so many effects, the disease often goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, says Rebecca Risk, a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and founder of Calgary’s Ananta Health.

“Lyme disease is a multisystemic disease, so it will go anywhere, and it often can affect somewhere that’s’ weak,” Risk says. “One myth is you have to have a known tick bite and a lot of people don’t notice ticks. They can’t be the side of a poppy seed. You don’t have to know of a bite; most people don’t.

“Another myth is that people will have a target or bullseye rash,” she says. “Only about 10 per cent of people get that rash. Some people will get a sudden illness with chills or fever. It’s important to understand it’s not straightforward.”

Risk has first-hand experience with the illness. She was 29 when she was first diagnosed—after experiencing a myriad of symptoms for 14 years. She says she had 120 symptoms in total, notably pain and a movement disorder where she had no control over her muscles.

Getting a diagnosis is difficult, she says, because, there’s no simple blood test for the disease. According to the CDC, the accuracy of the test depends upon the stage of disease. Some people choose to have various tests for Lyme done outside of Canada, such as Germany or the United States, Risk says.

Oftentimes, the disease is treated with antibiotics. Risk’s health improved over three years of being treated with antimicrobial herbs.

According to the CDC, people who have been treated with antibiotics for Lyme disease can still have pain, fatigue, or difficulty thinking more than six months later, due to a condition called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS).

This could happen if Borrelia burgdorferi triggers an auto-immune response after the infection itself is gone.

Last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) set “ICD codes” (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) for Lyme Disease. According to Risk, this means that there are human rights violations in cases where the disease is denied by health-care professionals.

“Someone could come in and they can’t walk or they’re having seizures, and they’re told it’s anxiety and it’s obviously not,” Risk says.

Tick exposure can occur year-round, but ticks are most active from April to September.

Ticks live in grassy, brushy, or wooded areas, or even on animals. Spending time outside walking your dog, camping, gardening, or hunting could bring you in close contact with ticks.

The CDC reports that many people get ticks in their own yard or neighborhood.

It recommends checking for ticks after being outdoors on your body and clothes, walking in the centre of trails, and avoiding wooded and brushy areas with high grass and leaf litter.

As for Twain, she’s embracing her new voice as she prepares for her Las Vegas residency, “Let’s Go!,” that starts in December.

https://ca.style.yahoo.com/shania-twain-lyme-disease-voice-loss-184255764.html