“Like clockwork, I knew a new day’d come,” sings Shania Twain on her seventh studio album Little Miss Twain. Described as a personal passion project, the record sees the country crossover star fully embracing her country roots as she reckons with the origins of her music career. Long before she was Shania or even Eilleen, her given name, the singer was Little Miss Twain from Timmins, a small mining town in northern Ontario, Canada. Twain’s dedicated fanbase is surely aware of the poverty and tragedy that bookended the singer’s early life, but never has she delved as deeply into the archive on Little Miss Twain. Against all odds, the album is surprisingly upbeat for a narrative about sad beginnings.
More than anything, Little Miss Twain is a love letter to the singer’s late mother, who acted as something of a manager when Twain first began performing as an underage preteen in local bars after they had stopped serving alcohol. “According to my mother, I’m the next Tanya Tucker,” sings Twain on the title track, which lovingly features guest vocals from Tucker herself. Where Twain’s mother pushed her to pursue her evident musical gifts from a young age in a quiet plea to free their family from a home plagued by financial hardship and domestic violence, Twain recalled a rebellious urge to push back and follow her own path, undoubtedly influenced by needing to be everything to everyone from far too young an age.
“Don’t call me ’cause I can’t help / Call somebody else,” she sings on “Quit My Life”, a portrait of a girl and woman who’s always had to carry everyone else’s emotions. Everything came to a grinding halt when Twain’s mother and adoptive father were killed in a car accident when she was 22, prompting her to leave the city and move back home to save her underage siblings from being placed in foster care. In an ironic turn of events, the personal tragedy Twain suffered forced her to fall back on her innate ability for performing, moving her family to Huntsville, Ontario, where she took up employment as an entertainer at a local resort.
While the story of Shania Twain’s coming of age as a musician is an undercurrent throughout the entire record, its most personal offering is arguably the ode to her hometown, “Northern Town”. She sings of bringing home a Dairy Queen treat for her mother to hide the fact that her father had been out drinking, of cutting family members’ hair, of friends who moved on and away to bigger things: “Oh, just so you know, I’m ready to go / Down if you stick around.” However, it’s the last line of the chorus that makes the song hit home for Twain and certainly anyone else scarred by loss: “Oh, I wish you were still around.” Although the singer attributes the line to friends who moved away, one can’t help but think she’s singing about her parents, flaws and all.
Elsewhere, Little Miss Twain embodies an old-school country flair reminiscent of the Chicks‘ earlier work while eschewing the misogyny still found in the genre. Twain tries her hand at her own take on political correctness on “Problematic”, in which she confesses she’s just someone who needs a partner: “I’m a woman who needs a man / Can’t help myself, it’s just who I am.” And if speaking such a truth indeed makes her problematic, she doesn’t mind at all. The LP closes with “Rockstars”, a hopeful antithesis to “Northern Town” and its teary nostalgia. “Winters are white, and the lakes freeze over / And the rock stars / Rock stars never get older,” she sings of growing up and holding onto dreams in harsh Canadian winters.
Although the track could be interpreted as Twain romanticizing a rural upbringing that often included not enough food to feed her family, it’s instead a sign of a modern music legend shedding light on and finding closure around a period in her life she had only ever discussed in the occasional interview or her autobiography. The singer sees the record as molding both parts of herself together: the first part being her life when she was Little Miss Twain with her mother’s dreams of stardom, and the second encompassing Twain’s rise to global superstardom after her mother’s untimely death. While her mother might never have lived to see how much the early work paid off, we have the privilege of a glimpse into Shania Twain’s past, present, and future.