{"id":710101,"date":"2026-07-25T06:34:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/710101\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T06:34:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:34:09","slug":"shania-twain-little-miss-twain-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/710101\/","title":{"rendered":"Shania Twain: Little Miss Twain Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shania Twain<\/a> 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\u2019s storied Horseshoe Tavern\u2014an intimate venue that\u2019s 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 \u201cwasn\u2019t established enough,\u201d she told the crowd: \u201cI feel it\u2019s a very full-circle moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

That homecoming instinct runs strong on her seventh album, Little Miss Twain. After adding pop and rock hyphens to country\u2019s 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\u2019s Queen of Me<\/a>. In the rootsy arrangements of Little Miss Twain, her voice\u2014weightier from dysphonia and the surgery she underwent to address it\u2014finds a fitting home for its impressive force. But the more striking shift is what she\u2019s willing to say with it.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Twain wrote or co-wrote the majority of the album, borrowing heavily from country, blues, gospel, soul, and rock\u2014textures 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\u2019s 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 \u201cNorthern Town,\u201d singing with a crackling edge to her voice: \u201cDad pulls up to the bar\/Us kids wait in the car while he has a beer.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

On \u201cLittle Miss Twain,\u201d she sits closer to her memory. Twain reminisces about hoping that her prodigious talent\u2014\u201cAccording to my mother, I\u2019m the next Tanya Tucker,\u201d she sings\u2014will be enough to overcome the poverty surrounding her. The song clutches onto a riveting, escalating tension. It\u2019s like she\u2019s still singing from the uncertainty of reaching for her dreams rather than the hindsight of having achieved them. Her voice\u2019s raspier quality matches T Bone Burnett<\/a>\u2019s grizzled electric guitar, while the actual Tanya Tucker<\/a> deepens the effect, braiding alongside Twain\u2019s for a heavy-throated hymnal. \u201cLittle Miss Twain\u201d resists the easy arc of vindication. That release comes instead from Tucker\u2019s presence\u2014when she sings the line, all these decades later, it\u2019s a nod to the fact that Twain\u2019s aspirations would lead her to become an icon in her own right.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cyoung and dumb and in a rush\u201d on the thumping gospel track \u201cNew Love,\u201d which ends on a honeyed fiddle refrain. That same full-body flush morphs into sultrier blues-rock on \u201cFaded Blue Jeans,\u201d all steaminess and thrill. Singing with Queen of the Stone Age<\/a>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shania Twain has performed in stadiums around the world and carried off not one but two Las Vegas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[375,96,59,56,54,55,307],"class_list":["post-710101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}