NEW YORK (AP) — Before Shania Twain was Shania Twain, she performed in Canadian bars as a child, singing to miners, loggers, fishermen and hunters who drank the night away.
“It was a more boisterous crowd. And it was smaller crowds,” she says in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I could only go in after the bar closed. It was after midnight because I was underage. And while the bar was closed, I could go in and play while everyone was finishing their last call.”
It was “character building,” she says, painting a picture of a bygone era of her life in Northern Ontario that stands in stark contrast to the glitz and glamor associated with the five-time Grammy Award-winning country musician. But those days played an important role in what became her career. “I spent many years dreaming about things that would eventually happen, but it took a while,” she says.
Twain said her latest album, “Little Miss Twain,” released Friday, charts a period of her life from her first performances at age 8 to her 20s, when she signed to her major label.
“This is a whole period of life that I’ve never written about,” she says. “I wanted to tell a story, a personal story… This is a phase of my life that few of my fans know about.”
Returning to the past – in different ways
A number of songs from “Little Miss Twain” have been kept by the singer for many years. “Rockstars” I wrote probably 10 years ago, but “Northern Town” has been around for a long time,” she says.
The record’s title track, “Little Miss Twain,” is her emotional heart—a song for her mother, who died in a car accident in 1987 along with her stepfather and never found success. For Shania, it was an opportunity to reflect on how “my mother was my manager and my agent, my driver and my coach, even though she couldn’t sing a note,” she said. “She took me to all these scenes, underage in bars, and that’s where I got my experience.”
According to her, this song was one of the last to be included in the collection, but “it was this missing piece that came to me.” This is at least partly due to the participation of Tanya Tucker, who duets with Twain on the track.
In the chorus, Twain sings, “According to my mother, I’m the next Tanya Tucker.”
Twain says of Tucker’s recording: “I don’t know if I can ever explain in words what it meant and what it would have meant to my mother.”
The song also features her son Edge D’Angelo Lange on backing vocals; he appears on some of the album’s tracks. “I get to realize a lot of things that my mother wouldn’t have been able to share with me,” she says of working with her son. “It’s really beautiful.”
FILE – Shania Twain performs during the Calgary Stampede in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, July 5, 2025. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)
Genre explorations from a country music giant
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Taking advantage of her early years, Twain was able to focus on some of her musical interests both within and outside of country music. Listen closely and you’ll hear: “The Motown, country and western that my grandparents played, like Marty Robbins,” she says. “There’s a lot of rock music in there. ‘Faded Blue Jeans’ is very much a blues rock song,” it features Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme.
The album’s multi-genre moments, which also feature Ronnie Wood, work to Twain’s current voice, which now has a wrinkled rasp. “I don’t have that nice sound that I had years ago, but I have a new sound that I really like,” she says. “And I think I write songs a little differently because of that.”
Several years ago, Twain contracted Lyme disease, which affected her voice. In 2018, she had implants installed in her larynx. “This is a very unusual procedure for a singer,” she says. “The nerves in my larynx were damaged. So my vocal cords were fine.” The operation worked, and as a result, her already unmistakable voice took on a sort of husky tone, a harsh vocal quality, and an added distinction.
When her audience listens to “Little Miss Twain” for the first time, Twain hopes they leave behind “a feeling and sense of the atmosphere in which I grew up, the environment that shaped me, the experiences that developed me as a person and as an artist,” she says.
She wants them to meet a cover singer at a local bar, a woman who didn’t make it as a child. “I hope they learn,” she pauses, “about the missing chapter of who I am.”