Shania Boards - View Single Post - Interview with Shania -LAS VEGAS

Shania Twain: It was totally dependent on the doctor because that was the key to me ever singing again, and it was genuinely in real time, so it’s not like we pasted it together. I had gone to Vegas reluctant, that I would get overwhelmed and that it would just scare me more than anything, to be honest. But I felt really good walking in there. The Colosseum had such a great sound.
Anybody who is sensitive to acoustic and vocal environments, a sound environment, can appreciate how great that room feels. That struck me first. Just speaking, I felt good in there. There was so much space in there, yet it felt very intimate. I had a very good sense of my voice and my speaking sound.
Dysphonia [a disorder making it difficult to produce vocal sounds from an enfeebled voice] is not a singing problem. It’s a voice box issue in the muscle on the voice, very different from having a nodule on the vocal cords, which I’ve never had. I’m lucky that I’ve never had that. It needs a long renewal time, and even today, I am still addressing it. You have to go through the entire recovery process. So once I visited the doctors after I left Vegas, I was more confident. I think once you understand what’s going on, you just feel better already.
When you go to the doctor and you’ve had this pain and you don’t know what it is, you’re worried, you’re concerned, you don’t know what to expect, you almost don’t want to know. I think everyone has experienced that, so I was relieved to know that they were optimistic, and it was something identifiable, that there were specialists who would deal with it. It made everything a little less mysterious, and that took a lot of the anxiety away from me. I still hadn’t committed to Vegas, but then I was trying because I wanted to do it.