On her last album – 2023’s chart-topping ‘Queen Of Me’ – Shania Twain was living her best life unapologetically, in the present day, as one of the most successful music artists of all-time.
But her latest effort, ‘Little Miss Twain’, sees the singer-songwriter revisit her formative years on a 15-song collection that returns the star to her Canadian roots, and leans into the country, soul, R&B and Motown sounds that first inspired her to take up her craft.
Fusing her signature storytelling and pop-leaning melodies with the hard graft and grit of growing up in a working-class town, it’s a record that paints a candid picture of the journey Twain travelled to arrive where she is today.
‘According to my mother, I’m the next Tanya Tucker / She drives me to sing at the bar,’ she sings on the title track – a collaboration with Tucker – and one of several tributes to her mother (Twain’s parents died in a car crash when she was just 22 years old), whose influence is felt across the project.
She remembers both of her parents on the anecdotal ‘Northern Town’, recalling visits to the Dairy Queen restaurant and snapshots from family life at home, as she admits: ‘I wish you were still around.’
For every low there are several highs, from the joy and liberation of young love to first cars, riding horses and her first forays into the music industry.
‘How’d he go from couldn’t be to could he be the one?’ Twain considers on opening track ‘Stranger Things’ – striking immediately as an instant classic – before recalling early romances and playing in bands as a kid on ‘New Love’.
They are, perhaps, the most straight-up country moments on ‘Little Miss Twain’, while much of the LP proves to be the genre-bending exercise one would expect of the artist who revolutionised country music in the late 1990s with her seminal third album, ‘Come On Over’.
Take lead single ‘Dirty Rosie’, for example, which bridges country, rock, soul and bluegrass, all with Twain’s inimitable flair.
‘Faded Blue Jeans’, a collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age‘s Josh Homme, adds a blues edge to the mix, while ‘Take It To The River (with The War and Treaty and Rolling Stones legend Ronnie Wood) is another rootsy moment and the funky ‘Quit My Life’ – with stacked harmonies backing Twain’s gritty vocal delivery – is a sing-a-long ode to relinquishing life’s responsibilities and embracing the now.
Where tracks like ‘Right Time’ showcase glimmers of the pop edge that propelled her to global superstardom, it’s unexpected moments like ‘That’s The Money’ – about long afternoons by the river riding horses in the sunshine, as one with nature – or loved-up ditty ‘Down The Middle’ that really capture the essence of ‘Little Miss Twain’ and bring to the fore the spirit of the young girl who dreamed of the success that Shania Twain would achieve decades later.
There’s a poignancy, then, come the album’s closing track when Twain, now 60, takes one final roadtrip back to her hometown and remembers a time when ‘winters are white and the lakes freeze over / and the rockstars never get older’.
Whether drawing a line on her country-pop past or merely taking a detour into her early years, it’s a record that cuts to the heart of an artist who, for years, has been characterised by bedazzled cowboy hats, leopard print and yells of “let’s go, girls!”.
For the first time in decades, Little Miss Twain takes centre stage – and it’s a triumphant return.
