Then there’s the matter of Little Miss Twain, her seventh studio album, arriving this July; the title an homage to her childhood stage name and its 20 tracks a paean to her youth. The album, in all of its soulful glory, revisits the years before Nashville, before Shania Twain became one of the most recognisable names in country music. The bluesy “Faded Blue Jeans” recounts the early loves of her life, while the Motown-inspired “Scary Thing” pays tribute to her love of the genre. “A lot of it was influenced by R&B music,” she says. “It was influenced by ’70s rock and folk and there’s a bit of Chicago in there and there’s a bit of Motown in there…”
Suffice it to say, Shania is in a reflective mood. Long before the Grammys, the Vegas residencies and the estimated 100 million records sold worldwide, she was a little girl in Canada being encouraged onto small stages by her mother to sing Dolly Parton songs, original tunes and Top 40 hits. “Well,” she says of her career taking off, “it wasn’t all of a sudden.” Born Eileen Edwards and raised in Timmins, Ontario, Twain was singing professionally before she was a teenager. Her late mother, Sharon, was her de facto manager, promoter, A&R and chauffeur. “According to my mother, I was the next Tanya Tucker,” Twain laughs whilst also reciting a song lyric. “She had a target for me. She had a goal.”
Looking at Twain today – perched sideways on a velvet seat, elegant in a floaty black Dolce & Gabbana jumpsuit, gold monogrammed bangles stacked on both wrists – it is tempting to believe superstardom was inevitable, though she herself is keen to correct that assumption. “You just know that you love something when you’re little and you know that you’re obsessed with it,” she says. “I probably had my 10,000 hours by the age of 10.”
By the time she signed her first record deal in Nashville at 27, however, she had “already lived three lives”. In 1987, both of her parents were killed in a car accident, after which Twain moved home to raise her younger siblings. Nearly a decade later came the dizzying success of The Woman In Me and Come On Over – still the bestselling studio album by a female solo artist in history; spawning hits like “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!”, “You’re Still The One” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much”.
“‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman!’ is definitely the headline statement of my recording career,” she says. The 1999 song, which earned her her second Grammy and remains a cross-generational anthem of female empowerment almost 30 years on, was borne out of Twain’s hard-won comfort in her body. “I was literally coming into my own skin, finally feeling comfortable as a woman,” she says. “I was always very intimidated by my own body.” A turning point came on the set of a music video, when she was asked to wear two bras. “I was like, ‘I’m not wearing two bras. I’m taking both bras off,’” she says, laughing. “Because, what am I doing? What have I been waiting for? And hence ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman!’ was like, ‘alright, this is what you’ve been waiting for.’ The moment to celebrate that as women, you can have as much masculinity and femininity as you want in your vibe.”
