S
hania Twain is turning back the clock. On her new album, Little Miss Twain, the 60-year-old singer-songwriter connects the dots between Shania the superstar and the young girl who sang Marty Robbins and Freddy Fender covers in motel bars in her native Canada.
“My first Top 10 [hit] was when I was 30. From the age of six all the way up to then is this whole gap of my life and my music that nobody knows about,” Twain says on a new episode of Rolling Stone‘s Nashville Now podcast, recorded at her property in Las Vegas. “The theme of the album is me catching everybody up on who I am as a whole.”
But Twain, who opened all 12 of Harry Styles’ Wembley Stadium concerts this summer in London, isn’t doing it alone. Little Miss Twain features guest appearances by Tanya Tucker, the War and Treaty, Ronnie Wood, and even Josh Homme. Producer Zach Dawes came to Twain with the idea of having the Queens of the Stone Age leader on “Faded Blue Jeans.” “He said, ‘Josh is a fan. I really hear him on this with you,’” Twain recalls. “I said, ‘Are you crazy? I would love that.’ I’m a rocker, you know? I’m a late-Eighties rocker.”
Little Miss Twain is an autobiographical album, rooted in your formative years in Timmins, Ontario. What was it like growing up there?Little Miss Twain is a reflection on the whole journey of a pre-recording artist — it’s the songwriter trying to eventually make it to Nashville, around that big round conference table.
