Shania Twain has revealed where she stands with her ex-husband Robert “Mutt” Lange, over a decade after he infamously cheated on her with her close friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud.
The singer spoke about Lange, who had an affair in 2008, during a recent appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. When Shepard and his co-host, Monica Padman, asked about the infidelity, they said they were “really nervous” to bring it up, before Twain reassured them that the topic wasn’t “embarrassing” to discuss.
As she confirmed that Lange and Marie-Anne were still together, Twain also revealed that she doesn’t really talk to her ex and that they “just text” about their 21-year-old son, Eja.
“Mutt and I parent well together,” she explained. “We both love our son so much, so we don’t play any games like that. We have the same priorities. We share spaces, no nonsense there.”
Shepard also called Twain’s current relationship “a bit of musical chairs,” as she married Marie-Anne’s ex-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, in 2011, three years after her divorce from Lange.
However, the “Man I Feel Like A Woman!” singer noted that prior to the infidelity, she, Lange, Marie-Anne, and Frédéric would all hang out. But at the time, she wasn’t “close” to her now-husband.
“He was not really part of our daily lives because he’s working these crazy hours,” she explained. “A lot of travel [for his] very high-profile company, just suit and tie and so he would be around, like, weekend dinners and stuff like that, we would all eat together and that was it. And then it would be mostly him and Mutt chatting, so I didn’t really know Fred very well.”
However, Twain recalled how after the affair, she became closer to Frédéric and called their bond “beautiful surprise,” as she saw “how gracefully and graciously he was dealing with” the “same pain”.
She went on to praise Frédéric for how he handled his ex-wife’s infidelity, while she struggled quite a bit with her split from Lange.
“He was smarter about it and I was uncontrollably fragile over it, which I had never felt before ever, because I thought for once, I was stable,” she said. “I really believed that I’m safe, so that really devastated me I think more than any other instability I’ve ever felt.”
When Shepard asked Twain if she was “mad” at herself, after finding out about Lange’s affair, she said yes. She also confessed that, at the time, she had asked herself how she could be “so stupid”. However, the “You’re Still The One” star acknowledged that Frédéric was having the same feelings as her.
“Fred’s so smart. This is one of the smartest people I know, he didn’t know either. That helped me feel better,” she said about the affair. “Neither of us saw it coming.”
After noting that she’s “let her guard down” too much in the past, she explained how “angry” she was about the affair and that it took her a while to let that feeling “go”.
“The anger comes a lot from my childhood too because I’m thinking, ‘Man, you can do anything to me, but if you f***ing lie, like, right to my f***ing face? Now, I’m so angry,’” Twain added. “I spun around in that for quite a while. That was the hardest part to let go of really, the anger.”
Although Twain said that she doesn’t really talk to her ex-husband, she confessed that she’d be open to working with him again, during an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe last month. Lange previously co-wrote some of Twain’s songs with her and produced her 1997 album, Come On Over.
“I’d love to make another album with him, or just a song,” she said. “I don’t think he would…I just don’t think he’d be interested.”
When asked why she didn’t think that Lange would want to work with her again, she responded: “He’s turned that page very definitively…I think he just wants the past to be, you know, behind him.”
She emphasised that although she doesn’t think that a collaboration with her ex will happen, she does “think about it often”.
