WATCH: Shania Twain Fights Tears as She Reveals Career Started Aged 8 — Performing in Dive Bar CAGES
Shania Twain opened up about how she was forced to perform in dive bars in cages when she was just eight years old.
Aug. 1 2024, Published 3:15 p.m. ET
Trailblazing music icon Shania Twain was singing in country dive bars in cages at eight years old, just to put food on her family’s table, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The Man I Feel Look a Woman singer, 58, teared up as she spoke about her reluctant start in showbiz in Ontario, Canada, sharing she initially wanted to be a veterinarian or an engineering architect.
Said Twain: “I was very uncomfortable…and it might have been that I was performing in adult venues – bars.”
Twain sat down with CBS to talk about her upcoming third residency in Las Vegas 'Come on Over - All the Hits'
CBS host Anthony Mason said: “I’m thinking Blues Brothers with people throwing bottles at you if they don’t like you.”
Twain replied: “That’s exactly it. Many bars I played had cages.”
The singer’s heartbreaking confession came around two and a half minutes into an interview with CBS Mornings to promote her third Las Vegas residency for her Come on Over… All the Hits show. The residency is named after her 1997 hit album, which still stands today as the best-selling album of all time by a female solo artist.
Shania Twain tears up around 2:35 when she talks about singing in dive bars as a kid.
After sharing she had no desire to perform at such a young age, Twain revealed she had no choice: “The adults all around me thought I should be a star; they all thought I should be the next Tanya Tucker.” (The American country western singer who had a hit song with Delta Dawn at the age of 13.)
Twain admitted that music was a “passion, not a profession” for her at the time – and something she did best when she was alone.
She revealed: “If my parents were fighting, I would go to the backyard, start a fire, and sit there with my guitar and pretend that everything went away.”
Over the years, Twain’s incredible successes would be marred by a series of intense struggles, beginning with growing up in an abusive home and being dirt poor.
Shania Twain went from rags to riches, growing up poor, in an abusive household and having to raise her four siblings at the age of 22.
Her mother and stepfather were killed in a car crash in 1987, when Twain was just 22 years old, and she was left to raise her four younger siblings. She went through a harrowing divorce, suffered from Lyme disease after being bitten by a tick and underwent throat surgery.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, in 2020 Twain released her album Now, her first in 15 years. She left the stage after undergoing laryngoplasty, an operation to reconstruct her vocal box.
Last year the singer feared the effects of her Lyme disease had returned after she took a spill onstage in Chicago while performing her 76-date concert tour.
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Twain admitted she had dreams of being a veterinarian or an architect as a child.
Twain also opened up about her 20-year battle with the disease in the Netflix documentary, Not Just a Girl.
She said: “The tick was infected with Lyme disease, and I did get Lyme disease. My symptoms were quite scary because before I was diagnosed, I was on stage very dizzy. I was losing my balance, I was afraid I was gonna fall off the stage…I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds.”
Twain kicks off her 'Come on Over' residency on Aug. 23 in Vegas.
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Twain also expressed her fear that the disease would ruin her career.
“My voice was never the same again. I thought I’d lose my voice forever. I thought that was it, [and] I would never, ever sing again.”
Now, she’s back – bigger and better than ever. Her Come On Over residency at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas begins on Aug. 23 and runs through December.
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