“I don’t really feel connected to the accolades,” Shania Twain says.
“Not because I don’t feel good about earning them, and the reward of conquering some of the challenges or reaching the top of so many of the climbs. I recognise all that.
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“But I just don’t feel like a star.”
It’s a surreal experience to sit opposite one of music’s biggest names; the woman who turned three simple words, “Let’s Go Girls”, into one of pop music’s most enduring rallying cries.
Having just released her most personal album to date, Twain is ready to look back.
“I’m at a point in my life and in my music where I’m listening to more music that I grew up with, reuniting with that music, reuniting with my childhood self,” she says when we chat for this week’s episode of Take 5 with Zan Rowe.
We’ve met up at Power Station in New York City, a famous recording studio where Born in the USA, Let’s Dance, Like a Virgin and Mariah Carey’s debut album were made.
Today, the studio’s wooden beams soak up a different story.
For the first time, Twain is peeling back the layers of a star who sold more than 100 million albums to show the little kid who got her there.
Growing up in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario, Eileen Regina Twain never imagined she’d be famous.
She was just trying to make sure her family had enough money to buy milk the next day.
Food was scarce and she often went to school without lunch.
Shania Twain is one of the guests on the latest series of Take 5 with Zan Rowe. (ABC: Marian Sell)
When the needle drops on her first Take 5 choice, Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors, the resonance runs deep.
“I wore second-hand everything,” she says. “Especially in the winter when you gotta wear a lot of layers. Dolly Parton’s one of my songwriting teachers.”
Eileen’s mother, Sharon, first recognised her daughter had an ear for music and pushed her to perform.
“My mother realised that I had this gift, so she was dreaming about the career success,” Twain says.
“I was dreaming about riding horses … I was dreaming about things that little kids dream about.”
Eileen began singing, for the family, on tabletops at cafes, to anyone who would listen.
They’d head off to the local beer and whiskey joints, Sharon nudging the bar owner to pass the hat around as Eileen sang.
The $25 or $50 she’d raise would pay for petrol that week.
“It’s right down to the penny when you’re poor,” Twain says.
Her mother knew she had to get her daughter in front of bigger crowds. It didn’t matter that she was singing covers of Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
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“When I first get up there, nobody believes me because I’m nine, and what do I know about divorce?
“Sometimes I would get a heckler that would say that … ‘What do you know about divorce?’ They’re drunk. You’re just a kid. You don’t even have all your teeth yet. But I can imagine what it is and I can tell it like I know it.
“I started off as Little Miss Twain, and by the time I was done, I was their entertainer.”
Eileen would have to grow up fast off-stage too. After moving to Toronto, the hub of the Canadian music industry, both her parents were killed in a car accident.
At 22, she moved back home to raise her four younger siblings.
Once again money was tight, but Eileen got a gig singing Vegas-style cabaret at a resort five hours away, moved the family out there, and worked every night, honing her performance across genres.
“By the time I was in my late 20s, I had been through so much,” she says.
“So, I already had quite a bit of conviction. I was already quite certain about my ideals. And I had a vision.”
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When she got to Nashville and signed her first record deal, the label wanted her to change her surname.
“They thought something would flow better with Eileen than Twain,” she recalls.
“I felt like I would be abandoning my family by changing my last name for my career. And I’m like, ‘It’s just not worth it. There’s got to be another way’.”
She came across a girl with the name Shania.
“I’m like, oh, that’s it. What a beautiful name. I love this name. And that was it: I became Shania Twain.”
Her third studio album, 1997’s Come On Over, made her one of those rare stars known globally by only her first name thanks to success of songs like You’re Still The One, Man! I Feel Like A Woman, and That Don’t Impress Me Much.
Nearly three decades on, the album is still the bestselling studio album by a female artist, with more than 40 million sales, and it solidified her as a trailblazer in the crossover from country to pop.
“The type of country that I wanted to make was definitely more of a stomp. There was more might in it. I wanted to give it attitude. I wanted to be part of that attitude, and I wanted to say it like it was and be frank. What I proved was that the audience also wanted that.”
Almost 30 years later and millions more albums sold, she’s digging back into her past with her latest album, Little Miss Twain.
“I don’t really see my career as a comeback,” she says. “I kind of see it as, I was allowed to continue what I started.”
The heart of the record is its title track, where Shania sings:
“According to my mother, I’m the next Tanya Tucker / She drives me to sing in the bar / Push-start the Chevy, it’s old, and it’s heavy / And I’m still smaller than my guitar / Smoking like a chimney, coaching it in me / ‘Honey, you’re gonna go far’.”
As we sit together in this famous studio in a city of dreams, I ask her what she would say to little Eileen Regina Twain, if she had the chance.
“I would say you made it, and I would tell her you can make it. Your mother is right. Except you won’t be the next Tanya Tucker. You’re going to be Shania Twain.”
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