Shania Twain on personal new album 'Little Miss Twain'

Before there was Shania Twain, there was Eileen Regina Twain, a young girl growing up in the northern Ontario lumber and mining town of Timmins. And before she went on to become the best-selling female country artist of all time, there was an eight-year-old - "still smaller than her guitar," as she sings on her new album's title track - riding in her mom's broken-down car to gigs, dreaming of a way out.

On Little Miss Twain, Twain's seventh album out Friday (July 24), the country-pop superstar takes listeners back to a time when success was far from certain, and everything seemed possible and impossible at the same time. It's a stardom that her parents wouldn't live to see, after they died in a car accident when she was 22, and Twain deferred her own ambitions to raise her younger siblings. Several years later, she was discovered in Nashville - and with her second album, 1995's The Woman in Me, catapulted into the stratosphere.

The album is full of vulnerable, intimate details of Twain's early years that she hadn't shared before, because she thought they were too personal. "As a commercial songwriter, I always thought, ‘Well, nobody would really be able to relate to what I'm saying if I'm singing about that,'" she says. But as the songs took shape, Twain had faith that as unique as the details may be, the emotions of yearning, love and loss were certainly universal. Similarly, almost every song shifts to a different musical style, all reflective of the genres she embraced growing up from bluegrass, R&B, rock, country and even big band. "Musically, it's very relatable to a lot of people's love for mixed genres," she says.

Working with a wide slate of songwriters and guest artists - ranging from Tanya Tucker and Ray Parker Jr. to The Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood, Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme, T Bone Burnett, The War and Treaty and Justin Tranter - the five-time Grammy winner cast the album to reflect the diverse musical styles.

The Republic Records release comes after her stint opening for her good friend Harry Styles during his record-setting, 12-show Wembley Stadium run in London earlier this summer. Styles is not on the album: "I didn't ask him. He's invited me now so much, so I'm the next to invite!" she says with a laugh.

Twain radiated warmth as she talked to Billboard over Zoom from Ireland, where she had just played her own show at Thomond Park Stadium in early July, as she revisited not just the making of the album, but her youth.

What made you feel like this was the right time to do this kind of project?

Some of these songs have been around for a while. I didn't really think they would ever end up on an album necessarily; they were just things I was enjoying writing and reflecting on. And then it just came to a point where I realized that there was such a collection of them that they could make an album. They were they were all about the same period of my life, and that is pre-Shania. So, before I was Shania Twain, I was just [performing as] Little Miss Twain, singing cover songs in remote parts of Canada. Things and places and emotions and experiences that nobody knew about. It made sense to make that a theme as a collection of music.

The title track is very visceral. You take the listener back to your being eight in the car with your mom, going to perform.

I was completely projecting myself in the moment. That was such a repetitive scenario in my childhood. We never had a new car. All of our cars had to be pushed to start. That was our life, so it wasn't a one-time thing. It was part of our lifestyle to live in cold weather, and deal with the more rustic way of living. My music and performing classes would be a local bar in a remote gold mining town. Every [song on the album] is, in one way or another, reflective of my mindset and my environment as Little Miss Twain. My relationship with my mother was at the core of my development as a little singer that was never going to get discovered there, but that my mother always thought somewhere in the back of her mind it could maybe be possible.

On "Northern Town," you describe these quotidian adventures, like going to the Dairy Queen with your dad, that you were robbed of once they died. You've always been fairly private about your growing up. Could you have released songs like this before?

It's taken a lot of years of processing. Of course, death is something that we grieve forever. That never ends, but it does evolve. And where you can, you come to terms with various elements of grief, which is healthy and very natural. The difficulties and the challenges in our lives when I was a kid, some of that was very devastating. The fact that we all survived those difficult times, but then [my parents] die in a car accident that has nothing to do with our difficulties - and it can happen to anyone at any time - what that did was that prevented them from seeing this enormous, rare level of success that was so far from reality of what I talk about on this album.

If you're a singer, you dream about Nashville, Tennessee. You know, there's executives there sitting around a conference table, you're imagining what it must be like - and then I actually get there, and it's for real. It was only in my mother's imagination. She didn't really know anything about it. She just knew that Tanya Tucker was a good example of what she thought I could aim for.

And now you're singing with Tanya on "Little Miss Twain." Were you in the studio together? 

We were. This is, to me, country music history. This is Tanya Tucker we're talking about here. Tanya Tucker was a child star with country music songs that were part of my repertoire, and she was the quintessential goal for me. Not necessarily my eyes, but in my mother's eyes; like, "That is what you need to be, Eileen. You need to be the next Tanya." And to finally not only to write this song that I think really captured that whole sentiment, but then for Tanya to actually agree and come to do it in the studio with me… I was there, producing her vocal, and I still can't even believe it.

Had you met her before?

I met her backstage - I think it was at the Grammys - and I just passed her in the hallway, and I said, "Oh my God, I just want to talk to you. Is that possible?" And on our way out, we met in the alley at the garbage bins and took a photo, and I gushed out my love for her and my mother's love for her.

It would be probably a couple years later that I would write "Little Miss Twain," and I didn't plan on her singing on the record. The record was already done, and I called her up and said, "By any chance, would you consider singing on this?" But I didn't want to play her the song, because if she wasn't able to do it, I didn't want her to hear the song until after it was out, so that I could surprise her with it. But the fact that she did come without ever hearing it, I was able to play it for her in person. That was so beautiful.

Musically, "Stranger Things," which opens the album, sounds like the rhythm of a chugging train, as if you're taking the listener on a grand adventure. That seems like an intentional choice.

You are right. It is a chugging train, and this has always been my sound reference for so much of the North, because our roads were always so bad. For most of the year, most of our transport until the roads got bigger was relying on trains. Our trains run right through the middle of our towns, just like our river, because those were the big transport avenues. The train was always coming from somewhere I'd probably never been, and it was going somewhere I was maybe never going to ever go to.

So, there was always a mysterious element to trains, and I would imagine as a kid that I would just jump on the train and escape, and I didn't care where it took me. So, the chugging train has an emotional rhythm to it for me.

There are also songs on here about first loves, like "Faded Blue Jeans" with Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme. Do you still have those jeans?

Those jeans have been in my life since I was a teenager. These are the kind of jeans that came in style, went out of style and now everybody buys these jeans in vintage stores. Those jeans are in the "Any Man of Mine" video and then they come back again in the photography of the album Up. "Faded Blue Jeans" is very literal and true.

It's your "Strawberry Wine."

It's true, it's my northern "Strawberry Wine." It doesn't really place us anywhere, but it does take all of us back to that time when we were experimenting with boyfriends and girlfriends, and there was a freedom in it. That is one of the many songs on the album where it's very descriptive.

Eja, your 24-year-old son, is on here as a co-producer and a co-writer on a few tracks. That must be a proud mom moment.

He does so many of the things that I don't do, so it works well because he's technical and I don't know anything about the technology. I'm still stuck in my acoustic guitar singer, folk writing thing. But he operates everything and he plays all these instruments, and he works with so many different genres. He takes me somewhere that I wouldn't go on my own, so we complement each other a lot. I think we'll do more together in the future.

How do you get Ronnie Wood to write with you and play on your record?

It's the strangest thing. We were both together over Easter, just by chance, at a beach resort and I went over and said hello. We just loved each other from the minute we met. I was working in the studio there on this record and I said, "I'm in the studio tomorrow if you want to come by and just hang out." He came and he played bass, he played guitar, and we were having a really great fun time. Then the next night we had dinner together and we ended up jamming out the beginnings of what ended up to be "Take It to the River."

What do you think made you ready to open up in this way, and what do you want listeners to get from this album?

Time definitely allows - or has allowed me - us as humans to come to terms with a lot of things, and we learn to stop taking time for granted, to enjoy our truth, and my youth. A lot of that part of my past is not necessarily relatable to a lot of people in the world. If you're a commercial artist, for example, most people sing about Margaritaville, because that's more relatable. I don't think I've ever met anybody since I left my hometown that comes from a gold mining town. We just have gold and forests, moose, beavers and lots of lakes. We have beauty and we have a culture, but it's a culture that nobody really knows much about. So as a commercial songwriter, I always thought, "Well, nobody would really be able to relate to what I'm saying if I'm singing about that."

I was writing it all the time, but I was writing it not for any particular reason except for my own self-reflection. But it did make sense over time that, "Well, this is actually a project, and I think I can deliver it in a way that will be at least intriguing to people who don't even know that Little Miss Twain exists."  It brings me a lot of joy to share that part of me. Shania Twain was born out of this little singer who comes from somewhere that nobody really knows anything about.

Do you worry that people won't be able to relate to it?

A lot of it musically is very relatable because there's a lot of soul from the ‘60s. There's a lot of southwest sounds, the baritone guitar. Musically, it's very relatable to a lot of people's love for mixed genres: bluegrass, the Motown era, and all of that is in there from my own youth and being raised with so many genres. I think even if you don't really get some of the things I'm saying, you'll relate to the music.

This album feels like it demands to be performed from start to finish. Any plans?

I would love to do a select group of shows of just this album live, and it would take a very specific group of musicians because there are some Motown things, there's some horns, there's bluegrass elements. That would be a dream scenario, so that's a plan for sure.