Some Revelations About Mutt Lange, Shania Twain’s Ex-Husband from ‘Not Just a Girl’ Netflix Documentary

In the 1990s Shania Twain’s career exploded behind the one-two punch of The Woman In Me and Come On Over, albums that effortlessly blended country music tradition and her distinctive singing style with dynamic flashes of pop and rock. And in the producer’s chair for those records was Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who at the time was coming off absolutely huge hits with AC/DC’s Back in Black and Def Leppard’s Pyromania, but it wasn’t just a professional collaboration. “We met, we fell in love, we were engaged, wrote an entire album, all in six months, and got married in that six months as well,” Shania Twain says in an archival clip included in her new Netflix documentary Not Just a Girl.

Mutt and Shania went on to write and record 2002’s Up!, their third hit record together. But trouble soon came faster than success. Twain contracted Lyme Disease in 2004, and that led to a career hiatus due to lasting issues with her singing voice. But then came the 2008 announcement of her separation from Lange, which happened soon after Shania learned that her husband had been sleeping with her best friend, Marie-Ann Thiebaud.

“My husband leaves me for another woman,” Shain Twain says in her Netflix doc. To her, losing Mutt was a similarly intense experience to when her parents died in a 1987 car accident. “It was a permanent end to so many facets of my life.” It’s a galvanizing moment, and certainly suggests that Twain’s emotions are in a much better place now than they were in the immediate wake of her separation and divorce from Lange. In Shania Twain: Not Just a Girl, there’s even a clip to prove it. When Meredith Vieria asks the singer and songwriter about her husband’s infidelity during an interview, Twain’s face is a flat blank of anger and resentment. But the divorce from Lange was finalized in 2010, and she remarried in 2011. (Frederic Thiebaud, Shania Twain’s new husband, is actually Marie-Ann’s ex-husband.) She wrote a bestelling memoir in 2012 (From This Moment On), and eventually returned to singing, writing new material, touring, and performing. “Let’s Go!” is Shania Twain’s second Las Vegas residency, and it’s booked through September 2022.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges