Shania Twain performs at The Horseshoe Tavern on July 17.FRED THIEBAUD/Supplied
Looks like she made it.
Shania Twain had been telling anyone who would listen that it was her dream to play Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. Last weekend, she finally walked onto the storied venue’s small stage, saying the gig was “very special to me” and the “coolest thing ever.”
The show in front of more than 400 squeezed-in fans who scored the $40 tickets online was in promotion of Little Miss Twain, a rootsy album (out July 24) that reflects on her formative years in Timmins, Ont.
After recently serving as the special-guest opener for Harry Styles’s 12-night residency at London’s 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium, the 60-year-old superstar arrived on the dive-bar stage in a lacy, corseted one-piece with a choker and knee-high boots.
Holding a sparkly black acoustic guitar, she sat on a stool and assessed the situation: “We need to make this place as hot and steamy as possible.”
Twain and her five-piece band then stepped into a fiddle-led, empowering number from 1995, Any Man of Mine: “This is what a woman wants / Any man of mine better be proud of me.”
After decades of worldwide fame, Shania Twain says she’s rediscovered her roots and the beauty of the place that shaped her. Her new album, ‘Little Miss Twain,’ allowed her to look back on her past with ‘a glass half full’ and reconnect with the joy of her upbringing in Timmins, Ont.
The Canadian Press
A lot has changed since 1995, Twain’s breakout year. For one thing, she probably wouldn’t have had three female musicians in her band, as she did on Friday in Toronto. And back then, the U.S. record label that told her to tone down her Canadian accent would also have strongly discouraged her from sitting down or hiding her body behind a guitar. The suits on Nashville’s Music Row would have preferred things to be as hot and steamy as possible. On the other hand, the country music establishment criticized Twain for baring her midriff in a music video.
Female country artists just couldn’t win. Twain did − and, for the most part, on her own terms.
She was a disruptor, hailing from Northern Ontario, not the likes of Butcher Holler, Ky., or Luckenbach, Tex., or any other American country-music reference point. She wrote her own songs with producer and husband Mutt Lange, a rock guy known for his work with the sugar-pouring hitmakers Def Leppard. Twain playfully but meaningfully struck a feminist stance, announcing herself with Any Man of Mine, which not only topped the country chart but made it into the pop Top 40.
Smash follow-up album Come on Over, with its radio-friendly riffs and snazzy videos promoting the songs, was an invitation that country-wary music fans accepted in droves. The album spawned four pop-crossover hits (led by Man! I Feel Like a Woman!) and earned four Grammys. It is still the best-selling studio album by a solo female artist of all time.
And to think, Twain’s big dream was to play the Horseshoe Tavern, where Willie Nelson, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Stompin’ Tom Connors once crooned. That dream doesn’t seem to have faded – unlike a pair of jeans she fondly recalls in a new song.
At the 10-song Horseshoe show, Twain sang Faded Blue Jeans, one of three singles released in advance of the Little Miss Twain album. It’s about teenage love and Levi’s − “Rolling in the grass in ’em, trying to get your hands in ’em” − and Twain’s God-fearing parents, who did not approve.
Her mother and stepfather, Sharon and Jerry Twain, died in a car accident in 1987, when Twain was 22. It was left to her to take care of her two younger siblings, which she did by performing at a Vegas-style music revue at the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville, Ont.
Twain’s mother, a stage mom, had wanted her daughter to be a child country star − specifically the next Tanya Tucker.
“I would never hit that mark, and my mother would not live to see me ever have success,” Twain said toward the end of the performance.
She sang the album’s title song, a classic country-style ballad detailing the dreams of her mother – and her own, too: “Gonna make it to that big, round conference table at a major record label / Little Miss Twain, please sign your name.”
The album version of the song features none other than Tucker herself. On stage, Twain described recording it together as a “full-circle moment.”
She followed Little Miss Twain with a nineties hit that launched a million karaoke moments and encouraged women to raise their voices. The crowd sang the chorus to the spunky anthem Man! I Feel Like a Woman! with abandon, which is the point.
“Oh-oh-oh, I wanna be free, yeah.”
The title of the new album is a reference to the condescension she faced as a young female artist. Some in the country music industry resisted her feminine worldview and crossover country-pop aesthetic. And even if they accepted the latter, they gave the credit to her male songwriting partner, Lange.
Now, in 2026, the Timmins native is an iconic inspiration to female artists who followed in her bootsteps, and the establishment is in line with the crowd at the Horseshoe. They are all singing Shania Twain’s song.