Shania Twain on Her Most Personal Album Yet, ‘Little Miss Twain’: ‘It Brings Me Joy to Share That Part of Me’

Before there was Shania Twain, there was Eileen Regina Twain, a young girl growing up in the northern Ontario lumber and mining town of Timmins. And before she went on to become the best-selling female country artist of all time, there was an eight-year-old — “still smaller than her guitar,” as she sings on her new album’s title track — riding in her mom’s broken-down car to gigs, dreaming of a way out.

On Little Miss Twain, Twain’s seventh album out Friday (July 24), the country-pop superstar takes listeners back to a time when success was far from certain, and everything seemed possible and impossible at the same time. It’s a stardom that her parents wouldn’t live to see, after they died in a car accident when she was 22, and Twain deferred her own ambitions to raise her younger siblings. Several years later, she was discovered in Nashville — and with her second album, 1995’s The Woman in Me, catapulted into the stratosphere.

The album is full of vulnerable, intimate details of Twain’s early years that she hadn’t shared before, because she thought they were too personal. “As a commercial songwriter, I always thought, ‘Well, nobody would really be able to relate to what I’m saying if I’m singing about that,’” she says. But as the songs took shape, Twain had faith that as unique as the details may be, the emotions of yearning, love and loss were certainly universal. Similarly, almost every song shifts to a different musical style, all reflective of the genres she embraced growing up from bluegrass, R&B, rock, country and even big band. “Musically, it’s very relatable to a lot of people’s love for mixed genres,” she says.

Working with a wide slate of songwriters and guest artists — ranging from Tanya Tucker and Ray Parker Jr. to The Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, T Bone Burnett, The War and Treaty and Justin Tranter — the five-time Grammy winner cast the album to reflect the diverse musical styles.

The Republic Records release comes after her stint opening for her good friend Harry Styles during his record-setting, 12-show Wembley Stadium run in London earlier this summer. Styles is not on the album: “I didn’t ask him. He’s invited me now so much, so I’m the next to invite!” she says with a laugh.

Twain radiated warmth as she talked to Billboard over Zoom from Ireland, where she had just played her own show at Thomond Park Stadium in early July, as she revisited not just the making of the album, but her youth.

What made you feel like this was the right time to do this kind of project?

Some of these songs have been around for a while. I didn’t really think they would ever end up on an album necessarily; they were just things I was enjoying writing and reflecting on. And then it just came to a point where I realized that there was such a collection of them that they could make an album. They were they were all about the same period of my life, and that is pre-Shania. So, before I was Shania Twain, I was just [performing as] Little Miss Twain, singing cover songs in remote parts of Canada. Things and places and emotions and experiences that nobody knew about. It made sense to make that a theme as a collection of music.

The title track is very visceral. You take the listener back to your being eight in the car with your mom, going to perform.

I was completely projecting myself in the moment. That was such a repetitive scenario in my childhood. We never had a new car. All of our cars had to be pushed to start. That was our life, so it wasn’t a one-time thing. It was part of our lifestyle to live in cold weather, and deal with the more rustic way of living. My music and performing classes would be a local bar in a remote gold mining town. Every [song on the album] is, in one way or another, reflective of my mindset and my environment as Little Miss Twain. My relationship with my mother was at the core of my development as a little singer that was never going to get discovered there, but that my mother always thought somewhere in the back of her mind it could maybe be possible.

On “Northern Town,” you describe these quotidian adventures, like going to the Dairy Queen with your dad, that you were robbed of once they died. You’ve always been fairly private about your growing up. Could you have released songs like this before?

It’s taken a lot of years of processing. Of course, death is something that we grieve forever. That never ends, but it does evolve. And where you can, you come to terms with various elements of grief, which is healthy and very natural. The difficulties and the challenges in our lives when I was a kid, some of that was very devastating. The fact that we all survived those difficult times, but then [my parents] die in a car accident that has nothing to do with our difficulties — and it can happen to anyone at any time — what that did was that prevented them from seeing this enormous, rare level of success that was so far from reality of what I talk about on this album.

If you’re a singer, you dream about Nashville, Tennessee. You know, there’s executives there sitting around a conference table, you’re imagining what it must be like — and then I actually get there, and it’s for real. It was only in my mother’s imagination. She didn’t really know anything about it. She just knew that Tanya Tucker was a good example of what she thought I could aim for.

And now you’re singing with Tanya on “Little Miss Twain.” Were you in the studio together? 

We were. This is, to me, country music history. This is Tanya Tucker we’re talking about here. Tanya Tucker was a child star with country music songs that were part of my repertoire, and she was the quintessential goal for me. Not necessarily my eyes, but in my mother’s eyes; like, “That is what you need to be, Eileen. You need to be the next Tanya.” And to finally not only to write this song that I think really captured that whole sentiment, but then for Tanya to actually agree and come to do it in the studio with me… I was there, producing her vocal, and I still can’t even believe it.

I met her backstage — I think it was at the Grammys — and I just passed her in the hallway, and I said, “Oh my God, I just want to talk to you. Is that possible?” And on our way out, we met in the alley at the garbage bins and took a photo, and I gushed out my love for her and my mother’s love for her.

It would be probably a couple years later that I would write “Little Miss Twain,” and I didn’t plan on her singing on the record. The record was already done, and I called her up and said, “By any chance, would you consider singing on this?” But I didn’t want to play her the song, because if she wasn’t able to do it, I didn’t want her to hear the song until after it was out, so that I could surprise her with it. But the fact that she did come without ever hearing it, I was able to play it for her in person. That was so beautiful.

Musically, “Stranger Things,” which opens the album, sounds like the rhythm of a chugging train, as if you’re taking the listener on a grand adventure. That seems like an intentional choice.

You are right. It is a chugging train, and this has always been my sound reference for so much of the North, because our roads were always so bad. For most of the year, most of our transport until the roads got bigger was relying on trains. Our trains run right through the middle of our towns, just like our river, because those were the big transport avenues. The train was always coming from somewhere I’d probably never been, and it was going somewhere I was maybe never going to ever go to.

So, there was always a mysterious element to trains, and I would imagine as a kid that I would just jump on the train and escape, and I didn’t care where it took me. So, the chugging train has an emotional rhythm to it for me.

There are also songs on here about first loves, like “Faded Blue Jeans” with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme. Do you still have those jeans?