Shania Twain Reclaims Her Pre-Fame Years on ‘Little Miss Twain’

Shania Twain’s next album is an attempt to fill a biographical silence. Little Miss Twain, the 60-year-old’s new record, traces the two-and-a-half decades before her first Top 10 hit—the years she spent playing Marty Robbins and Freddy Fender covers in bars across Canada. “The theme of the album is me catching everybody up on who I am as a whole,” she said.

The project pulls in unexpected collaborators. Ronnie Wood, Tanya Tucker, the War and Treaty, and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme all appear. Producer Zach Dawes pitched Homme for the track “Faded Blue Jeans,” and Twain, who describes herself as a “late-Eighties rocker,” agreed without hesitation. The song is rooted in memories of being 17, “rolling around in the grass with my boyfriend,” in clothes that, however worn, she never wanted to discard.

Twain’s writing on Little Miss Twain is deliberately sensory. In “Northern Town,” a detailed Dairy Queen order evokes not just a place but a deal struck with her father: wait in the car while he had a beer at the bar, then get ice cream, and never mention the stop. After her parents’ death in a car accident when she was 22, she set aside a possible record deal to raise her younger siblings. That interruption makes the album more than nostalgia; it’s the sound of an artist finally retrieving a lost segment of her life, after Wembley Stadium runs with Harry Styles and decades of global fame.