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Shania Twain waited fifteen years between albums, and when she finally returned at age 52, she did it with a changed voice and no creative safety net. On September 29, 2017, Mercury Nashville released Now, her first studio album since Up! in November 2002. By October, it had debuted at No. 1 on both the Billboard 200 and the Top Country Albums chart, moving 137,000 units, including 134,000 pure album sales. At fourteen years and ten months, it gave Twain the longest gap between No. 1 Billboard 200 albums for a female country artist. The silence behind those fifteen years had been brutal. A 2003 tick bite left her with Lyme disease and dysphonia, damaging the nerves in her vocal cords until she could no longer sing. Then in 2008, her fourteen-year marriage to producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange ended after his affair with her close friend and assistant, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Twain found steady ground again in 2011 when she married Frédéric Thiébaud, the former husband of the friend who had betrayed her. Still, making music required starting over alone. Every song from her 1990s diamond era had been written and produced with Lange. For Now, Twain sat alone with an acoustic guitar in the Bahamas and Switzerland, writing all sixteen tracks on the deluxe edition by herself. Despite having sold over 100 million records, she was nervous to send rough vocal demos to new producers Matthew Koma, Ron Aniello, Jake Gosling, and Jacquire King. To rebuild her voice, she underwent open-throat thyroplasty surgery, remaining awake on the operating table to sing while doctors adjusted Gore-Tex implants against her vocal cords. Her voice returned lower and huskier than the clear tone of Come On Over. When the call came in October 2017 that Now was No. 1 in America, Twain broke down in tears, knowing she had written and sung her way back on her own.

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When Shania Twain released Now on September 29, 2017, fifteen years had passed since her previous studio album, and the woman behind more than 100 million record sales had to relearn how to make a record from scratch.

That autumn, Mercury Nashville put out her first full-length project since Up! arrived in November 2002. Within days, Now opened at No. 1 on both the all-genre Billboard 200 and the Top Country Albums chart, earning 137,000 equivalent album units, with 134,000 coming from traditional album sales. At age 52, after a gap of fourteen years and ten months, Twain set the record for the longest stretch between No. 1 Billboard 200 albums by a female country artist.

Before she could book a single session for those songs, she had to figure out why her voice had disappeared. A 2003 tick bite while riding horses had given her Lyme disease, which damaged the nerves controlling her vocal cords and led to dysphonia. For years, conventional specialists looked at her cords and saw nothing physically wrong, even as her ability to project sound faded until she could not call out for her dog.

Her private life collapsed during that same quiet period. In 2008, her fourteen-year marriage to producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange ended after she learned of his affair with her close friend and property manager, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Because Lange had co-written and produced every song across The Woman in Me, Come On Over, and Up!, the divorce ended both her marriage and the only studio system she had relied on since 1993.

The slow turn back toward music started outside the studio. On New Year’s Day 2011 in Puerto Rico, Twain married business executive Frédéric Thiébaud, the former husband of the friend who had betrayed her. That same year, she documented her early vocal therapy on the television series Why Not? with Shania Twain, working with producers David Foster and Nathan Chapman to release “Today Is Your Day,” her first new single in six years.

Specialists eventually pinpointed the nerve damage behind her vocal cord paralysis, setting off a grueling daily routine of physiotherapy to isolate tiny throat muscles. To regain the stamina required for an album, she accepted a two-year Las Vegas residency, Shania: Still the One, which ran for 105 shows at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace between December 2012 and December 2014.

Once the residency proved she could hold a stage again, Twain forced herself to write without a co-writer. Retreating to the Bahamas and her home in Switzerland with an acoustic guitar, she wrote thirty-eight songs on her own, eventually narrowing them down to the sixteen tracks on the deluxe edition of Now.

Recording those demos meant handing over unfinished vocals for the first time in her career. Without Lange acting as a buffer, Twain admitted she felt terrified sending her raw home recordings to four producers she had never worked with before: Ron Aniello, Matthew Koma, Jake Gosling, and Jacquire King.

Instead of settling into one room with one mentor, she co-produced every track across five studios in three countries. She cut tracks with Aniello and Koma—including the lead single “Life’s About to Get Good” and “Home Now”—while working at Serenity West Recording in Los Angeles and House of Blues Studios in Encino.

From California, the sessions moved to Blackbird Studio in Nashville with King for songs like “More Fun” and “Soldier”. She also traveled to England to record “Poor Me” and “Light of My Life” with Gosling at Sticky Studios in Surrey and RAK Studios in London.

Those sessions captured a voice with a lower, huskier grain than the bright soprano of her 1990s hits, and Twain later underwent open-throat thyroplasty surgery, staying awake on the operating table so she could sing while surgeons placed Gore-Tex implants against her vocal cords to support the weakened nerves.

When the call arrived in October 2017 confirming that Now had debuted at No. 1 across the United States, Twain sat down and cried. Every lyric, chord, and co-production credit on the record belonged to her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJL4UGSbeFg

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Harold Reid spent over 200 days a year making audiences laugh as the bass singer of The Statler Brothers, while his wife Brenda stayed back in Staunton, Virginia, raising their five children on her own. Long before the quartet toured with Johnny Cash or won Grammy and CMA awards, Harold married his high school sweetheart, Brenda Ann Fitzgerald, in 1959 when both were in their twenties. Even as the group’s fame grew from the 1970s through the 1990s, the couple refused to relocate to Nashville. They stayed in the Shenandoah Valley so their four daughters and one son, Kim, Karmen, Kodi, Kasey, and Wil, could attend local public schools and grow up in their hometown church. Whenever the tour bus pulled out of Staunton, Brenda managed the house and farm alone. She sat up through fevers, fixed broken household items, and drove the kids to school meetings or the emergency room without complaining over the phone so Harold could focus on the stage. At the large wooden dinner table, she included Harold in the nightly prayer, told the children which state their father was singing in that evening, and had them make small handmade gifts for his return. After cleaning the kitchen for six and putting the youngest to bed on winter nights, she often sat alone in the living room by the landline phone, waiting for his midnight call from a distant hotel or truck stop. Standing nearly six-foot-five and known as the group’s comedian, Harold shed his stage persona the moment he stepped off the bus to the smell of Brenda’s baking. He often told friends that his greatest pride was never a music trophy, but the wife who kept their home light burning for over sixty years. After Harold retired in 2002 and later battled kidney failure, Brenda and all five children, along with a family that grew to include thirteen grandchildren, stayed by his side until he passed away at age 80 on April 24, 2020.

In 1956, teenage brothers Don and Harold Reid saved their spare change in Staunton, Virginia, to buy Elvis Presley records, never imagining he would one day walk into a Hollywood studio to sing a song Don wrote at home. By November 1974, The Statler Brothers — Don Reid, Harold Reid, Phil Balsley, and Lew DeWitt — released “Susan When She Tried” on their album Sons of the Motherland. Written solely by Don Reid, the song stepped away from the standard heartbreak ballads of 1970s country radio. Instead of dwelling on misery, it honored a woman who quietly wiped her tears, fixed her makeup, and held her head high after a painful breakup. The single climbed to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in early 1975. That message of quiet recovery soon reached Elvis Presley, who had long admired the quartet’s four-part gospel harmonies and was carrying his own private loneliness following his divorce from Priscilla Presley. On March 10 and 11, 1975, Presley stepped into RCA Studio C in Hollywood to record his own upbeat country-rock version of Don Reid’s song. Those March sessions proved to be the final professional recording studio dates of Presley’s life before he recorded exclusively at Graceland. Presley’s rendition appeared in April 1975 as the B-side to his single “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” and was featured on his album Today that May. When the advance record arrived in Virginia, the four bandmates gathered like kids to listen, falling silent the moment Presley’s voice filled the room with the melody Don had written at a wooden table back home. Even after winning Grammy and CMA awards, the Reid brothers kept a copy of Presley’s Today album in the place of honor in their Staunton memorabilia room.

At twenty-two, Eilleen Twain put her recording dreams on hold to raise her three younger siblings after a highway crash in northern Ontario took both of their parents. On November 1, 1987, her mother Sharon and stepfather Jerry died in a collision with a logging truck. Instead of pursuing music in Toronto, Eilleen became the legal guardian to nineteen-year-old Mark, eighteen-year-old Carrie-Ann, and fourteen-year-old Darryl. In 1988, manager Mary Bailey helped her land a steady singing job at Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville, Ontario. Eilleen moved the teenagers into a small nearby house, paid off their parents’ debts, and kept the family from being separated. Up to that point, she had sung country and rock in smoky bars wearing jeans, boots, and flannel shirts, or worked planting trees in the northern woods near Timmins. At Deerhurst, she had to headline Vegas-style revues like Viva Vegas and For the Love of Broadway, singing George Gershwin and Andrew Lloyd Webber twice a night, six days a week. Unused to high heels and choreography, she often stayed behind in the empty rehearsal room after the trained dancers went home, practicing steps in front of the mirror until she stopped stumbling. Because custom gowns were too expensive, she bought cheap fabric and bags of sequins, sitting at the kitchen table past midnight with needle-pricked fingers to sew her own stage dresses while her siblings slept. Once the curtain fell in front of the resort’s wealthy guests, she wiped off her makeup, put on a worn coat, and went home to pay winter heating bills, check homework, and make breakfast. In the summer of 1990, her youngest brother Darryl graduated from high school, and her siblings were old enough to stand on their own. Using the last of her Deerhurst savings, she recorded a country demo tape that soon reached producers in Nashville, where she took the name Shania Twain and carried every skill from that resort stage into her diamond-selling career.

In early 1974, the Bee Gees were singing over the clatter of knives and forks at the Batley Variety Club in northern England when a suggestion from Eric Clapton pointed them toward Miami. After their album “Mr. Natural” stalled, radio stations had largely moved on from Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, leaving the twenty-seven-year-old Barry wondering if their run was finished. Back in London, Clapton, who shared manager Robert Stigwood with the brothers, had just overcome heroin addiction and recorded his comeback album at 461 Ocean Boulevard in Florida. He told Barry the trio needed to leave England, rent that same oceanfront house in Golden Beach, and work at Miami’s Criteria Studios. With RSO Records treating the next project as a last chance, Stigwood paired them with Atlantic Records producer Arif Mardin, known for his records with Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield. In the living room at 461 Ocean Boulevard, the brothers sat together with acoustic guitars again, while Mardin patiently steered them away from slow British ballads toward driven American R&B. Each day, driving across Biscayne Bay on the Julia Tuttle Causeway to reach Criteria Studios, Barry listened to the car tires thumping rhythmically over the bridge’s concrete expansion joints. That daily sound became the chugging pulse of “Jive Talkin’,” giving the group their first American number-one single in four years. During sessions for “Nights on Broadway,” Mardin asked if anyone could sing a high, forceful ad-lib over the fade-out. Barry stepped to the microphone and pushed his voice into a piercing falsetto none of them knew he had, leaving Mardin, Robin, and Maurice stunned in the control room. That new sound carried their 1975 album “Main Course” to platinum status and set up the worldwide run of “Saturday Night Fever” two years later, all starting from a rented house in Miami and the rhythm of tires on a Florida bridge.

In 1974, when the Bee Gees were playing small clubs across northern England and Maurice Gibb was drinking heavily after a high-profile divorce, he met a woman outside the music business who stayed with him for the next twenty-eight years. A year earlier, his four-year marriage to Scottish pop star Lulu had ended under the weight of packed schedules and his worsening alcoholism. At the same time, the Bee Gees’ records were stalling on the charts. At twenty-five, Maurice met Yvonne Spenceley, a quiet woman who wanted nothing from the spotlight. They married on October 17, 1975, just as Maurice and his brothers Barry and Robin moved to Miami to record “Main Course” and launch the R&B and disco run around “Saturday Night Fever.” Away from the cameras, Yvonne built a steady home for him and their two children, Adam, born in 1976, and Samantha, born in 1980. Behind the harmony and bass lines that held his strong-willed brothers together, Maurice fought severe alcoholism from the late 1970s into the early 1990s. At his lowest point, paranoia led him to carry a handgun around the house, forcing Yvonne to temporarily take the children away for their safety, though she never filed for divorce. In the early 1990s, her firm boundary pushed him to enter Alcoholics Anonymous, knowing she and the children would be waiting at home if he got well. After getting sober by 1992, Maurice stayed clean for the last decade of his life and returned to his role as the peacemaker between Barry and Robin. Until his death in Miami on January 12, 2003, at age fifty-three, he told interviewers that Yvonne’s patience since 1974 had kept him from dying young like his brother Andy and allowed him to watch his children grow up.

On September 30, 1987, some of the biggest names in music walked onto a Los Angeles stage and spent the night working as Roy Orbison’s backing band. For much of the 1970s, American radio had largely moved past the man behind those towering early-1960s ballads. After losing his wife Claudette in a 1966 motorcycle crash and his two oldest sons in a 1968 house fire, Orbison spent years playing small clubs in Britain and Europe while disco and hard rock dominated back home. The tide turned on January 21, 1987, at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, when Bruce Springsteen inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Springsteen recalled lying in a New Jersey bedroom at twenty listening to Orbison’s records and told the room he had aimed for that voice when making his 1975 album “Born to Run.” Eight months later, producer T Bone Burnett gathered a lineup at the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove to film “Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night” on 35mm black-and-white film. Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, k.d. lang, and J.D. Souther asked for no solo turns. For an hour across seventeen songs, they played rhythm and sang harmony behind the fifty-one-year-old singer in his dark glasses. Standing at Orbison’s right hand, fresh off his massive “Born in the U.S.A.” run, Springsteen grinned toward his hero, traded guitar lines at the edge of the stage, and held his volume back whenever they shared a microphone so Orbison’s three-octave voice could lead. In an audience of about five hundred guests, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Idol, and Patrick Swayze rose to applaud after song after song. After the special aired on HBO in early 1988, Orbison joined the Traveling Wilburys and recorded “Mystery Girl.” When he died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988, at age fifty-two, just fourteen months after that Coconut Grove taping, he had already heard a generation of masters tell him to his face that his voice had never been forgotten.

In early 1958, Roy Orbison could not afford a proper gift for his young wife, so he put her name on a song that eventually bought him his musical freedom. Months after marrying sixteen-year-old Claudette Frady in November 1957, the twenty-one-year-old singer was broke in Memphis. His early hit “Ooby Dooby” had faded, and his subsequent Sun Records singles failed while producer Sam Phillips pushed him toward uptempo rockabilly instead of the ballads he wanted to sing. Unable to pay rent, Roy moved his bride into a small spare bedroom in his in-laws’ apartment. Some days they counted loose change from coat pockets just to buy bread and milk, and Roy nearly quit music for oil-field labor in West Texas. Watching Claudette endure the debt without complaint, he wrote an upbeat love song titled “Claudette” and played it for her on the edge of their bed. In March 1958, the couple drove to Terre Haute, Indiana, to see the Everly Brothers perform. Backstage in a cramped dressing room, learning Don and Phil Everly needed material for an upcoming Nashville session, Roy borrowed a guitar and sang the tribute he had written for his wife. The brothers asked to record it on the spot. Giving up the song meant letting go of his most personal piece of writing, yet Roy handed it over, knowing their rising fame could rescue his family. Publisher Wesley Rose placed “Claudette” on the B-side of “All I Have to Do Is Dream” in April 1958. As the single sold millions and hit number one, the B-side climbed into the Billboard Top 30 on its own. The royalty checks paid off the young couple’s debts, bought Roy out of his Sun Records contract, and led Wesley Rose to bring him to Monument Records, where ballads like “Only the Lonely” and “Crying” soon followed. When Claudette died in a motorcycle accident in June 1966 at age twenty-four, the three-minute gift from that borrowed Memphis bedroom remained the song that had started his true voice and carried her name for the rest of his life.

At the Grand Ole Opry’s 100th anniversary celebration, Vince Gill paused before singing “Go Rest High on That Mountain” to speak about his mother, who had also turned 100. For three decades, audiences have known the 1995 ballad as country music’s defining farewell hymn, performed at memorials for figures like George Jones and Charlie Daniels. Gill first began writing the piece after Keith Whitley died in 1989, only finishing the verses after his older brother, Bob Coen, died in 1993. Stepping onto the stage for the Opry’s centennial night, Gill stood in front of thousands of listeners gathered to honor a full century of country music and the hall’s departed members. Before starting the song, he connected the Opry’s milestone to his mother, Jerene Gill, whose own life spanned those same hundred years. His voice trembled in front of the quiet crowd as he spoke about how differently she hears the ballad. While the rest of the world listens to an anthem for fallen stars, he shared that for his mother, the song that night was simply about her son. That quiet dedication stripped away thirty years of awards and chart history in seconds. Even at a century old, Jerene still carried the weight of a mother who had buried her child, and Vince had carried the loss of his older brother right beside her. When the guitars finally came in under the stage lights, the grand centennial tribute gave way to something much closer to home. Gill was singing as a son sharing an old family ache with his mother, keeping Bob’s memory alive between them.

When Vince Gill chose the cover photo for his 50 Years From Home project, he set aside his famous guitars and picked up a Dobro for his mother, Jerene. Gill left Oklahoma City in 1975 at age 18 to chase a life in music. Over the next five decades, that path brought him 22 Grammy Awards, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, regular nights at the Grand Ole Opry, and years performing with the Eagles. Through all of those milestones, his closest tie to his roots remained his mother, who reached the age of 100. After his father, Judge Stan Gill, died in 1997, Jerene became his last living connection to the Oklahoma house where his father first encouraged him to learn music and where young Vince practiced during his early bluegrass days with his school band, Mountain Smoke. Millions of listeners know Gill for his pure tenor voice and the electric and acoustic guitars behind his biggest country hits. During quiet conversations with her son, Jerene shared a much simpler preference. She told him that as much as she liked hearing him sing, what she loved most was still listening to him play the Dobro. That resonator guitar was never the instrument that made him famous, though its warm, lingering notes carried his mother back to the afternoons when her family was still whole and her boy was playing in the living room. Nearing 70 and grateful to still have his mother here to listen, Gill placed the Dobro right on the cover of 50 Years From Home, turning a career retrospective into a quiet gift for the woman who heard him first.