Shania Twain was worried fans wouldn’t “be able to relate” to her personal new album.
The country pop icon is releasing her seventh album Little Miss Train on Friday (24.07.26) as she reflects on her early years before superstardom, growing up in a “culture that nobody really knows much about”.
She told Billboard: “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.’ “
However, the AGe-year-old singer – whose parents died in a car crash when she was 22 – thinks the music will be enough to draw people in without relating to all the lyrics.
She explained: “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.”
For a long time, the Man! I Feel Like A Woman hitmaker wasn’t sure if the songs on the LP would actually make it onto one of her records.
Shania said: “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.”
The songs were “all about the same period of my life”, which was pre-Shania Twain.
She added: “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.”