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Lionelrichie.com

Lionel Richie and Shania Twain's "Endless Love" is beautiful. It is hard to think that it almost never happened.Lionel Richie originally asked Shania to come to Nashville to record the song. She said no. He then asked her to come to LA or Miami both to which she refused. Finally he went to her. Shania was in the Bahamas filming for her show on the OWN channel Why Not? with Shania Twain, so Lionel met her in the Bahamas to record "Endless Love." Shania didn't even want to record the song in a recording studio. Lionel was wondering why she was being so difficult.

The fact of the matter was, she was scared.   "I didn't know that she has not done a vocal in seven years and has not been onstage in seven years," Lionel recalls. "So she walks in and announces to me 15 minutes before we're now to go in, she can't do it."

"I said to her, 'Let me see you for a minute,'" Richie recalls. "And I went in the room and I said to her, 'We have something in common.' And she said, 'What is that?' I said, 'We are both scared to death.' And she said, 'But you're Lionel Richie!' And I said, 'And you're Shania Twain!'"

Her fears were that she simply couldn't sing the song. She had a high bar to achieve what Lionel and Dianna Ross did in the original. "I said, 'We're going to go ahead and prove this wrong,'" Lionel remembers. "So when you hear the first time she comes in on this record...that's the first note she's ever tried after seven years. And I ask you, does she have a problem? The answer is no."

Well thank goodness for that since Shania will be debuting her Las Vegas residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace on December 1, 2012.

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