by Shania Twain
I was tiny, but, boy, was I stuffing myself like a pig. I loved these meals. The liberty of eating what I wanted, when I wanted, and however much I wanted was an experience of independence I’d never had before. As a vocalist, you don’t want to eat just before it’s time to perform, as it’s hard to use your diaphragm properly if your tummy is full, taking up space you need to fill up with a good intake of air, so I’d usually skip dinner. I was so gorged anyway, it’s little wonder that I didn’t need anything else.
The guys in Flirt and I lived like roommates in these band houses. One day I needed to borrow a pen. I went out into the hall and, forgetting to knock, opened the door to one of the rooms and was about to ask “Does anyone have a pen I could borrow?” But I never got the first word out.
One of the guys was lying in bed with the covers pulled up to his neck, and there was a curious pumping motion going on around his groin area. Of course, I realized he was masturbating. Crimson with embarrassment, and hoping to God that he hadn’t noticed me (he seemed to be pretty, um, engaged), I silently backed out of there, closed the door, and tiptoed back to my room, petrified that at any moment I would have one angry musician screaming in my face for having invaded his privacy.
I knew that men masturbated; stumbling upon him in the act just caught me off guard, that’s all. However, I have to admit that I was a late bloomer—make that latecomer—to the concept of masturbation. Even though I’d been sexually active since the age of fifteen, I still didn’t know that girls masturbated, too. I only discovered this a bit later when I was chatting with a girlfriend on the subject, as she was so open about it, and sex in general. I admitted to her that I was surprised she did it and that I didn’t even know a girl could. She couldn’t believe it and told me she’d been masturbating since she was thirteen. She was amazed that I was so new to this awareness, exclaiming, “Where have you been?!” I wasn’t really sure. It had just never dawned on me.
I would still say that in most ways I grew up fast, the result of singing in bars from the time I was eight, as well as growing up in a harsh family environment that demanded uncommon maturity from me, and now, at eighteen, touring with a rock band. But in many other ways of the world, I was still naïve.
11
On My Own
From the time I reluctantly moved back home from Toronto in 1981 at sixteen, I had told anyone who would listen that I intended to move back there once I was out of high school. And as soon as Flirt’s East Coast leg was over at the end of summer 1983, I did exactly that. My father, having more or less accepted that his eighteen-year-old daughter was now an independent adult, and not moving back home, packed the contents of my bedroom in the back of a van and drove me to the big city. Toronto was the hub of the Canadian recording industry. If I was to achieve my long-term goal of making music for a living, this was where I needed to be. It’s no different from the would-be starlet from Anytown, USA, getting off the bus in Hollywood, hoping to break into the movie business. Toronto is Canada’s largest city, with the greater Toronto area having a population of 5.5 million. It’s the fifth most populated municipality in all of North America.
Probably because I’d been around the bar scene so long, I harbored no illusions about how hard it would be to sing professionally full-time. Believe me, I’d seen many women performers in their thirties still playing dive bars, painfully aware that they had long since passed the point of becoming the next Tanya Tucker. I accepted the reality that the same fate might await me. Part of the reason that I was so restless to get on with this next phase of my life was to see if I could, in fact, support myself as a musical artist. One thing I knew for sure was that I had no intention of becoming marooned in clubs for the rest of my life. At some point, if things didn’t pan out, I would quit to go do something else—although I hadn’t decided exactly when and what that would be.
I shared a one-bedroom apartment with two girlfriends of mine who were starting college in Toronto: Laura, from Hanmer, and Michele, from Timmins. Having the company was great, as was getting to split the rent three ways.
Of course, in the music industry, there’s no academic ladder you can climb. As for exams, I suppose you could say that every time you walked out onstage, an audience was grading you. The same was true if you recorded a demo tape of yourself and submitted it to a record company; if you received a recording contract, you passed. Then it would be up to radio station programmers, the still relatively new video channels such as MTV and CMT (Country Music Television), and a national or even international audience to determine whether you received your gold or platinum diploma in the form of millions of record sales. But pursuing a career in music is really unlike pursuing any other field.
So while my roommates were in class during the day, my college education took place in the living room of our tiny apartment. My professors consisted of a long list of artists from a variety of genres. To a great extent, an amateur performer is left to assess the quality of her own work and whether it fits in—or doesn’t fit in—with what’s going on musically at the time.
I spent hour upon hour alone with my guitar, tape recorder, records, and pen and paper. At eighteen, I didn’t allow myself to worry too much about where this might take me; my sole focus was to get good. I would analyze how my singing and my songs measured up against my favorite artists. It was lonely and daunting, but not discouraging.
All these hours of self-motivated education reflects a theory I read of recently and believe has some validity. In his book This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at McGill University, as well as a musician, explains that in order to be a world-class expert in anything, be it audiology, drama, music, art, gymnastics, whatever, one needs to have a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. He writes, “We find this with music all the time. Some people may have a biological or genetic head start in music. In fact, we know that people, and children in particular, may all start at different levels when they get interested in music, but without 10,000 hours of practice, they probably won’t achieve world-class status, regardless of their innate ability. So on a pragmatic level, it takes about three hours a day over ten years to acquire 10,000 hours. So the time spent at the activity is indeed the most important and influential factor. Of course, this is consistent with what we know about how brains learn new tasks and skills. In other words, learning requires the assimilation and consolidation of knowledge within neural tissue. As the experience is repeated and enriched through practice and skill development, the stronger the memory and learning of that experience becomes.”
Over the course of the first eighteen years of my life, I most certainly had spent at least 10,000 hours in concentrated time on my creative development in the way of music. So much so, that I spent much of my youth isolating myself.
Had I lived by myself at eighteen, I might have become a hermit. Fortunately, my roomies, while hardly party girls, were sociable and introduced me to their new, interesting friends from school. Among these was a flamboyant guy from Trinidad named Sheriff, who was attending college in Toronto with a small group of friends from his home country. My understanding was that he came from a well-to-do family that had set him up comfortably, even with his own car.
Sometimes on a Friday night, we’d go out to gay bars with Sheriff and his friends. They’d come over to our place first, and we’d all dress up and put on dark eyeliner—the guys included. Madonna had just hit it big, and everyone was copying her look. We’d dress like her, back-comb our hair until it was too big and all spiky, then head out on the town. This was an adventure for me, as it was all new. Gay bars had the best dance music and the most impressive dressers. Another benefit, from a young woman’s perspective, was that you could dance with your friends without having to fend off guys trying to pick up ch
icks.
Being inexperienced at applying makeup, I marveled at how artistic and glamorous some of the men were. They looked so gorgeous, with features that had been defined and exaggerated with blushes, liners, shadows, and accessories. My fascination with this initial introduction to men transforming themselves into beautiful women likely sowed the seed of inspiration for a song I would write years later: “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” Not everyone got all dolled up, and I saw men who did not seem identifiably gay at all. Most of the clubgoers, though, paid incredible attention to style and aesthetics from top to bottom, taking obvious pleasure in and having fun with fashion and flirting. Looking great was part of the entertainment, it seemed. I was personally more interested in dressing to dance rather than for style: comfortable shoes and clothes that I could move and sweat in, basically. Not being in a club as the performer was novel to me, so when I was there socializing with my friends, I was there to dance, not worry about how I looked.
We had great, innocent fun on these nights out to gay bars, and I can remember jamming the dance floor shoulder to shoulder, getting lost in songs like UB40’s pop-reggae hit “Red Red Wine,” Madonna’s “Material Girl,” “When Doves Cry” by Prince, and Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” For me, alcohol wasn’t necessary to get high on the magical sound of “Red Red Wine,” especially because that particular record pumped through the club sound system so loud that you couldn’t hear the person dancing next to you and because it resonated through me like a drug anyway. Afterward, my roommates and our Trinidadian friends hung out laughing and talking into the wee hours of the morning. They would regale us with stories and descriptions of their beautiful country, especially its annual winter Carnival festival. It all sounded so exotic, and people and places far away intrigued me. Toronto was a real teaser in that sense, with such an intoxicating mix of cultures from the huge influx of immigrants flooding into Canada. Our colleges and universities attracted young people from all over the world. As a small-town girl who’d seen precious little of the world, I thrived on this exposure and was lapping it up.
Unfortunately, my funds lasted only until the spring. Much to my father’s delight, I returned to Timmins to work the entire tree-planting season, from May to October. I earned sufficient money to go back to the city with enough in the bank to last me through the winter. This time I roomed with yet another college student originally from Timmins, furnishing the place with my things and some throwaway furniture.
But just one month later, I came home one day to find her gone and her things cleaned out. No note, no explanation. How would I swing the rent on my own? What really pissed me off, though, was when the phone bill arrived a few weeks later with $300 in charges that she’d run up without telling me. I didn’t know how I was going to make it financially, but no way was I going to go back to living with my parents and lose my independence.
It so happened that my apartment was a stone’s throw from Ian Garrett’s house, where I’d taken voice lessons seven years earlier. I asked him for help in finding work, preferably in singing. He couldn’t do anything for me on that score, but once again, Ian made a deal: if I cleaned his house, he’d let me use his piano room. He’d even throw in some vocal lessons as well. As a songwriter, I was thrilled to compose on his grand piano: a real, black lacquer grand piano. It may have been a baby grand, but it was grand, that’s for sure, with a big, round sound and brass foot pedals. The scale of the piano was hard for me to judge, as the room it was in wasn’t very spacious, and it’s possible that the piano seemed larger than it was considering its proportion to the size of the room. I especially loved pumping the pedals to create a lingering effect on the notes, allowing them to overlap one another. Although I don’t know how to play per se, I’ve always been quite productive in plunking and tinkering my way around the keys to create melodies and chord progressions that were different from what I wrote when playing guitar. The piano set a fresh territory for me stylistically and definitely propelled my writing into a new direction. Guitar prompted more of a rhythm-based feel to my writing, whereas piano inspired less structure, and the melodies tended to meander and be more complex.
Money woes were a constant source of anxiety, however. I can recall sitting in Ian’s piano room humming melodies while watching the activity on the street corner below. I noticed a trio of attractive young women dressed provocatively in miniskirts and tight pants, stiletto heels, and fur coats. They always seemed to be coming and going, getting into one car and being driven away, then returning to the same spot a short time later. This urban drama also starred a pair of male characters, who seemed to orchestrate everything on the stage before me. It was like watching a silent movie through a window. After a few days, I finally caught on: these girls are prostitutes! I felt sorry for them having to sell their bodies for pay. Then again, they probably made good money, I guessed. I never would have considered going that route, but I could understand the desperation that can drive people to do things that they wouldn’t do otherwise. I was anxious about my ability to feed myself, but I slumped back over the keys and carried on with my music.
During this songwriting phase, I wasn’t very productive in writing songs I can even remember today. It was more of a developmental period of toying around with ideas that just lingered in my creative subconscious until eventually they worked their way into real songs. For me, song ideas remain unidentifiable until they are eventually placed somewhere into a song format and under a title. Until then, they roll around in my head, like so many of the bits and pieces that came to me while sitting at Ian’s grand piano.
For extra money, I resorted to taking odd jobs singing in bar bands that were sometimes contractually required to feature a female vocalist. As was usually the case, the repertoires reflected whatever was in the Top 40, which made it easy enough for me to wing it. The pay was feeble, and it was a creative and professional dead end, but it did help get me through the winter, so you heard not a word of complaint from me!
Correction: actually, I did benefit from the experience artistically in the sense that the pop and rock songs I was singing demanded a more dynamic stage performance, which had never been one of my strong suits. With practice, I got better at commanding the stage and interacting with the crowd—although I can’t say it ever came naturally. I began to come out of my shell with more and more experience, but if I’d had the choice to sit with my back to the audience on the floor, my legs crossed, hovered over my guitar, and still get paid, or to earn a living remaining a backup singer or recording commercial jingles in the studio, I’d have taken that above having to face an audience to perform. Just like when I was a kid, I loved harmonizing with other singers and enjoyed the challenge of coming up with individual vocal parts that would blend together seamlessly. Believe it or not, I used to imagine myself happily sitting on a stool in some out-of-the-way coffeehouse, strumming my guitar and singing my own tunes while people chatted quietly and sipped their coffee. I may have ended up in the spotlight, but I actually aspired to be in the background, where I felt safer and more reassured. You see, I didn’t enjoy music for the fact that it brought me attention; I enjoyed it because the music itself brought me pleasure. It took me somewhere else: in my own world within the real world. But as a female singer who was a very average guitarist, the only job I could get making money in music was to be in front as the lead singer. This forced me to be up front, center stage, if I intended to make a living in music.
Of course, that’s not exactly the ideal attitude for becoming a “star.” Stars are supposed to brim with confidence; they’re bold, beautiful, and shameless. At least, that’s what I thought it took to become a star. That certainly didn’t describe me; nor did I want to become that person. Therefore, my career plan—if there is such a thing in music—was to succeed based on my songwriting and vocal talents, not on my performing ability.
In the end, neither studio work nor coffeehouses worked out for me. I didn’t have the background in music theory to si
ght-read well enough to break into the exclusive network of studio regulars. Those singers were fast. Let’s say that you walk into a session for a commercial jingle or to lay down backing vocals on a record. The sheet music is placed in front of you, you run through it a cappella one or two times, the engineer rolls the tape, you nail the part in one or two takes, and you’re out the door. And bear in mind that this is for a piece of music that you’ve never heard before. I was too amateur as a studio singer to have a chance.
As for playing coffeehouses, I wasn’t a good enough guitarist to cut it on my own. I thought about hiring an accompanist, but the gigs didn’t pay enough to make it feasible financially. So I stuck to the night gigs on weekends. I would have preferred something during the day, because the subway ride back to my apartment at one or two o’clock in the morning made me nervous, being a young woman at night alone in a large city. Like any big city, Toronto had its share of crimes reported over the news, and being a small-town girl, I was leery of being out alone after dark.
I did reluctantly take jobs outside of music, which made me feel like a failure, because my goal was to be able to support myself as a musician. But I didn’t have a choice. I was hired at the McDonald’s across from the Toronto Eaton Centre shopping mall, right in the heart of the city. The biggest perk of working there was that you could eat for free, although only the food that had “timed out”—that is to say it was past the sell-by time and could no longer be sold. But for someone pinching pennies, I was grateful to be fed.
I took pride in doing a good job there, especially when it came to serving up McDonald’s famous fries. (Historical note: this was when they were still fried in artery-clogging beef tallow, not today’s vegetable oil.) Now, promise you won’t laugh, but I was a stickler about how the fries were arranged in your scoop-shaped cardboard container. To the eighteen-year-old me, it was critical that they be presented exactly as they appeared in any McDonald’s advertisement: standing as tall and straight as a platoon of soldiers, of a uniform height, and, for God’s sake, no broken or squished ones! I learned how to position the scoop and angle my wrist in such a way while cupping the fries that they slid into position precisely, thereby achieving a photo-perfect serving every time. Obsessive? Maybe. But I was just trying to live up to the photo ad. I do tend to be like that with most things, just wanting to do my absolute best at whatever I do.
