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.
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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.
