Shania Twain, the artist who turned three words, Let’s Go Girls, into one of pop music’s most enduring rallying cries, says she still does not feel like a star. Speaking as she released her most personal album to date, she said she recognised the accolades and the challenges she had overcome, but did not feel connected to them. Having sold more than 100 million albums, she is now revisiting the music she grew up with and, with it, her childhood self.
Born Eileen Regina Twain in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario, she never imagined she would be famous. Food was often scarce and she frequently went to school without lunch. Her mother, Sharon, recognised her daughter’s ear for music and pushed her to perform, taking her to local bars where the young Eileen would sing for tips passed around in a hat. The 25 or 50 dollars she raised would help pay for petrol or groceries that week.
By nine she was performing covers to rooms of adults, sometimes met with hecklers who doubted a child could sing about grown-up subjects. She grew up quickly offstage too. After the family moved to Toronto, both her parents were killed in a car accident, and at 22 she returned home to raise her four younger siblings, taking a cabaret residency to support them while honing her performance across genres.
When she reached Nashville and signed her first record deal, the label suggested she change her surname. She refused, feeling it would mean abandoning her family, and instead adopted the first name Shania after meeting someone who bore it. Her 1997 album Come On Over, powered by songs including You’re Still The One and Man! I Feel Like A Woman, made her a global star known by her first name alone.
Nearly three decades later, that record remains the best-selling studio album by a female artist, with more than 40 million sales, and cemented her crossover from country to pop. Her latest release, Little Miss Twain, digs back into that past, its title track imagining her mother’s early belief in her. Asked what she would tell the young Eileen today, she said she would tell her she made it, and that her mother was right, except that she would not be the next of anyone. She would be Shania Twain.
