From This Moment On (31 page)

After shows at Deerhurst, in the wee hours of the morning, I got to work recording rough versions of my original material. The guys in the band were night owls, so I was able to enlist a couple of them for these demo sessions. The recordings were pretty basic—amateurish, I’d have to say—but, then, we were taping in a makeshift studio that a friend had set up in his basement or sometimes at the lodge venue after the audience left. The soundman John Noble recently reminded me of how we also once used the basement bathrooms below the lodge stage as singing booths. He ran cables from the mixing board to the lower level to get some sound separation for the voice. Maybe we thought the acoustics were good in there, or maybe that was me. I often find that bathrooms have great vocal room sound. Singing my heart out till four in the morning after a night of belting out songs onstage for two hours would have given me an interesting vocal sound, at any rate!

Mary Bailey, my manager at this point, had arranged for a prominent
music business attorney named Richard Frank to travel all the way to Huntsville from Nashville, Tennessee, to see me perform. Music lawyers were well connected with record company executives and producers. Knight, Frank and Lion, Richard Frank’s law firm, consisted of music attorneys who played matchmaker for promising artists. What’s funny is that the review we were putting on at Deerhurst at that time bore no resemblance whatsoever to the music that I was interested in making or that Mr. Frank was interested in hearing. Nevertheless, it served as my showcase for the recording industry.

My big solo song was to be the dramatic ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which Bette Midler had recorded for the soundtrack to the movie
Beaches
and took to number one in 1989. Under the circumstances, the song had a special resonance for me. Here I was on the verge of finally realizing the dream that my mother and I had chased since I was little, and she would not be in the wings nodding her approval. It was then and at other noteworthy moments in the future that her loss often hit me the hardest. I wished so badly that she was alive so she could have been able to bask in my success.
Our
success.

Although I’d always imagined my mother dying young, I’d believed that it would be from something related to her abused, battered, and tattered life, or at the very least, from the effects of chain smoking. I prepared myself from a young age to lose my mother, but I never imagined I’d be robbed of her in such a common way. A car accident wasn’t worthy of taking my mother’s life, I thought.

Between the distraction of feeling so empty and alone in my mother’s absence and the pressure of feeling that I was about to sing for my life, I was nervous. Screw this up, and I might not receive another opportunity to prove myself to the record industry. Not only that, but I would have just minutes in which to change costumes and catch my breath before singing “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

I ran down a mental checklist of what I had to do: rip off the previous costume, squeeze into a sleek, floor-length gown and high heels, chic up my hair, and then literally run—in the heels—from
backstage down a flight of stairs, through the service hall, up two flights of stairs, along the side of the indoor tennis courts, up a ramp, and into the back of the ballroom, just in time for the spotlight cue.
And
I had to strike a statuesque pose and look completely poised because the song opens with a low dynamic, when, in fact, my heart was racing from the combination of nerves and having just sprinted from one side of the theater to the other.

Somehow, I managed to get through the number without passing out or without getting choked up on lyrics like “You were content to let me shine,” “I would be nothing without you,” and, of course, from the chorus: “Did you ever know that you’re my hero?” It could have been a letter from me to my mother.

This performance would be my first and last showcase. Luckily, I impressed Richard Frank enough for him to play my demo tape of original material for a well-known record producer named Norro Wilson, who’d helmed records by the likes of Reba McEntire, Charly McClain, John Anderson, and Charley Pride, to name a few. Norro, an accomplished songwriter himself, had sharply tuned ears and a sincere love for music. He was enthusiastic about my voice and songwriting, and he relayed his excitement about my potential to Mercury Nashville Records A&R man and close friend Buddy Cannon, playing a key link in the chain of events that led to the making of my first album. Buddy, in turn, thought that the label head Harold Shedd would be interested. He was right, and I was signed. I was told many years later that Buddy was reported as saying about me, “She got signed and I got my picture taken.” He was right about that, too, as other than my own personal recognition of him for his support during that time, he didn’t receive official, professional reward from the company or industry for being connected to my success story, although I’m sure that Buddy’s association with me as a new artist with Mercury Nashville is well known within the industry. But in the end, Buddy was not included on the production of my first record even though he was a big believer in me.

Within a matter of months, Harold and Richard Frank had hammered
out the details of my record contract, and just like that, I went from being a small-Northern-town girl with little chance of ever making a career anywhere outside the borders of my own country to signing an international recording contract at a record company that sat smack dab in the middle of Nashville, Tennessee. Nashville! Home to giant singing stars, top record producers, megastudios, hit songwriters, world-class musicians, and, basically, the crème de la crème of the music industry. This was it—the big time—the only place to be if you were trying to make it as a country recording artist. My mother’s dream was coming true at last.

Although I was technically the house “elder,” responsible for the bills and running the household, the place probably had more the feel of a clubhouse overrun by a bunch of kids. Carrie, Mark, Darryl, and I were in a new town, trying to make our way alone together.

My boyfriend at the time, Paul Bolduc, also from Timmins, moved in with us and helped man the house. With a mortgage, two teenagers, a house that needed maintenance, and a winter’s worth of firewood to chop, Paul was a tremendous support, and we made a good team. I’d met him in Timmins not long after my parents died.
He was only eighteen, four years younger than me. We would be together for more than five years.

My sister Carrie’s new boyfriend, whom she would eventually marry and is still married to today, was also around to help out with the boys at times. Jeff reminds me now of the heavy load that was on my shoulders during the first few years after our parents’ passing. He sometimes talks now about his observations of my challenges at the time, of running the household at such a young age and trying to deal with my grief at the same time. Jeff, by the way, is the guy who inspired the lyric “You’re one of those guys who likes to shine his machine / You make me take off my shoes before you let me get in” in the song “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” We all remember Carrie explaining that whenever Jeff drove her somewhere, she had to take off her shoes before getting in the passenger seat. He kept his vehicles sparkling at all times and was very impressive and a perfectionist in many ways for a nineteen-year-old, especially compared to us Timmins bushwhackers, who were definitely not worried about dragging in a bit of mud here and there.

Both Jeff and Paul were unusually mature, responsible, and cool for their age, and there were times when their presence was especially comforting—such as when the police came to the door in the middle of the night with one of my teenage brothers in tow, picked up for underage drinking. I’m small in stature, and a strong, intoxicated male teen can be a handful. I’m just grateful that the police never knocked on my door
without
one of my brothers, as that would have meant the worst. It was moments like these that I was thrust into instant parenthood and the worrying that comes with the territory; those sleepless nights when it’s three in the morning, and the kids still aren’t home. Sometimes I drove home from work at Deerhurst well after midnight, hoping that when I got in the door, both boys would be safe and sound, asleep. These were my genuine worries at the age of twenty-three, and I was relieved when they were where they were supposed to be.

My routine during the cold months was to stock up the stove with
wood that would burn for about four hours before it needed to be fed again. At six in the morning, I’d wake up and refill it, then wake up the boys for school around seven once the house had warmed up again.

My brother-in-law, Jeff, says today, “I think back on those times, and I don’t know where you found the courage.” I’m not entirely sure myself, but a particular dream I had back then boosted my strength. It couldn’t have come at a better time, because the weight of taking on two teenagers, working, homemaking, and trying to keep my career on track was beginning to seem too heavy for me to carry.

Here’s the dream: my parents come to me, but only my father speaks. He floats close above me; actually, just his face. In a gentle voice, he tells me that he doesn’t have much time, as my mother is waiting for him. I see her floating up behind him and want her to come forward, but she doesn’t.

My father says to me, “She was already on her way out of this world and is just now waiting for me to come.” He then reassures me that I am doing a good job, that everything is under control, and that I shouldn’t worry. Both of them want me to know that they know I am doing my best, and this is exactly what I am meant to be doing.

In my dream, and after I wake up, I feel so relieved and encouraged by his words. I needed to hear them so badly, because I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing a good enough job and that I was letting down my siblings after all they’d already been through. I’d turned my life upside down to keep us together, put a roof over our heads, and support us, but I still felt I couldn’t make them happy, and I believed it was my fault. But
of course
they were still unhappy: our parents had been snatched from us, along with the life that they had known in Timmins.

Back to my dream: The whole time my father is speaking to me, my mother is telepathically tapping him on the shoulder that it is time for them to leave. I desperately want them both to stay and to not leave me alone with all of this pressure, but it is as though they are about to cross a threshold, and there is no time to waste. It’s almost
as if they have to catch a plane, and if they miss it, they will be stuck in some kind of holding pattern or purgatory. My father explains that if he doesn’t go now, my mother will have to leave without him.

It was very symbolic to me that they both went on together, as it confirmed their destiny to me so clearly. Not only did they die together, my dream was implying that they really would be “together forever.” That actually brought me peace as well, since they’d both suffered so much throughout their lives, and I felt energized to hold up the fort for them, to not give up and to provide their other children with a measure of stability. I felt that I owed my father something in that sense, considering that he’d taken on Jill, Carrie, and me as his own children, and although he was not perfect, he was sincere and selfless to have done that. My respect for him was profound.

The time came when we Twain kids would go our separate ways, and there was no reason for me to stay in Melissa. The boys were over sixteen and seeking out their own independence, and Carrie and Jeff were getting more serious as a couple. Besides, I couldn’t afford it anymore, not without a job. I could no longer handle the monthly mortgage payments. Selling the house would take too long, so with Paul’s help, as he was an amateur carpenter at the time, I gutted the basement by hand and renovated it into an apartment with a kitchen, bathroom, and living space. Renting out both the upstairs and the downstairs enabled me to cover the mortgage. But once again I was a gypsy, with nowhere permanent to live.

I couldn’t help but find irony in the fact that I’d quit my well-paying gig at Deerhurst to pursue my career as an international recording artist—for free! That is, at least until I could prove myself. The odds of finding success in the music industry is said to be on the order of 0.005 percent. That’s right: point-zero-zero-five, at best; if one does the math on the success rate of
American Idol,
it’s even lower. One hundred thousand people audition for each season, so over ten years, that’s one million people. Only one singer wins each season, making ten winners overall. Only two have gone on to have genuinely successful careers, which makes the percentage of success
0.000002 percent. Lucky for me, back then I had no idea how slim my chances were. You can’t be discouraged by what you don’t know, so ignorance truly was bliss in my case. I had optimism on my side, and with the newfound freedom from domestic responsibilities, I thought that I might have the opportunity to make up for lost time. I was in my midtwenties; it was now or never.