Shania Twain has performed in stadiums around the world and carried off not one but two Las Vegas residencies, but this summer, a smaller stage felt like a dream come true. For the first time in her career, the 60-year-old songwriter played Toronto’s storied Horseshoe Tavern—an intimate venue that’s been a rite of passage for many Canadian artists. Not so Twain. She never got to realize her early wish of singing at the 500-capacity back bar because she “wasn’t established enough,” she told the crowd: “I feel it’s a very full-circle moment.”
That homecoming instinct runs strong on her seventh album, Little Miss Twain. After adding pop and rock hyphens to country’s sound over the course of her first three albums, Twain gradually veered away from the genre, ultimately landing far afield with the synth-fueled haze of 2023’s Queen of Me. In the rootsy arrangements of Little Miss Twain, her voice—weightier from dysphonia and the surgery she underwent to address it—finds a fitting home for its impressive force. But the more striking shift is what she’s willing to say with it.
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Twain wrote or co-wrote the majority of the album, borrowing heavily from country, blues, gospel, soul, and rock—textures better suited to her lower register than the pop stylings of her last two releases. Some of the best tracks offer a lived-in reality to the stories she’s long shared in interviews about her childhood singing in bars to help support her family. She wanders through memories of that small-town Ontario upbringing on “Northern Town,” singing with a crackling edge to her voice: “Dad pulls up to the bar/Us kids wait in the car while he has a beer.” The song picks up a locomotive rhythm, as if the only way to reflect on those scenes is with the momentum of having escaped them.
On “Little Miss Twain,” she sits closer to her memory. Twain reminisces about hoping that her prodigious talent—“According to my mother, I’m the next Tanya Tucker,” she sings—will be enough to overcome the poverty surrounding her. The song clutches onto a riveting, escalating tension. It’s like she’s still singing from the uncertainty of reaching for her dreams rather than the hindsight of having achieved them. Her voice’s raspier quality matches T Bone Burnett’s grizzled electric guitar, while the actual Tanya Tucker deepens the effect, braiding alongside Twain’s for a heavy-throated hymnal. “Little Miss Twain” resists the easy arc of vindication. That release comes instead from Tucker’s presence—when she sings the line, all these decades later, it’s a nod to the fact that Twain’s aspirations would lead her to become an icon in her own right.
The candor of those personal recollections extends to gentler territory: first love, first lust, and how the past can leave them entangled. Twain exalts the heady whirlwind of being “young and dumb and in a rush” on the thumping gospel track “New Love,” which ends on a honeyed fiddle refrain. That same full-body flush morphs into sultrier blues-rock on “Faded Blue Jeans,” all steaminess and thrill. Singing with Queen of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, she recounts the lightning bolt of desire at 17, a growl in her voice made all the more surprising considering that she has sung more often about the power dynamics of sex than its pleasures.
