The music superstar speaks to PEOPLE about her new album ‘Little Miss Twain’
NEED TO KNOW
- Shania Twain says that she is “in charge again” after facing “devastating challenges”
- “Fear fuels me,” the music superstar tells PEOPLE in a cover story
- Twain’s album Little Miss Twain is out now
Shania Twain is maneuvering her body into a tree pose while balancing on a library ladder at a members-only club in downtown Manhattan.
Barefoot in a navy ballgown, the music superstar is unflappable as she clutches the lace train and rocks out to her recent tourmate Harry Styles’s hit “Golden” (played twice in a row at her request). One could say it’s a risk, managing such a balancing act, but throughout Twain’s life, strength has been her superpower.
The Canadian singer-songwriter, who weathered poverty and an abusive childhood, has come a long way from her early days as a tomboy who once, as she recalls, “double bra-ed it” so she could fit in as she played football with the boys.
Credit: Victoria Will
Credit: Victoria Will
Since signing her first record deal in 1992, Twain has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, won five Grammys and become the top-selling female country-pop artist of all time. No small feat for a girl who grew up surviving brutal winters in the rural mining town of Timmins, Ont.
“You just can’t take the woods out of the girl,” says Twain, 60. “That’s for sure.”
After more than three decades in showbiz, Twain has never been stronger or more self-assured after enduring “devastating” challenges, including the loss of her mom, Sharon Twain, and stepfather Jerry Twain in a car accident when she was 22 and having to take care of her three younger siblings.
“I had to learn how to be brave really early on and not crumble,” she says, crediting her education and self-therapy to helping her move forward.
Credit: Victoria Will
There was also a tabloid-fueling 2010 divorce from her first husband and music producer, Robert John “Mutt” Lange, and vocal cord surgery after nearly losing her instrument to Lyme disease.
“I’ve gotten through difficult times by being capable of finding courage, being brave and pushing through the fear,” she says. “Fear fuels me.”
With so much upheaval behind her, Twain has never been stronger or more confident in her own skin.
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Twain just released her seventh studio album Little Miss Twain, which is a full-circle artist statement that features key memories from her youth in the lyrics.
“I’ve already spent all of my life processing the challenges [I’ve had],” she says. “I’m at a place where I really enjoy looking back on it with a smile.”
On her genre-spanning, new album, she enlists collaborators like Tanya Tucker, Josh Homme, The War and Treaty and even her son Eja Lange, 25, as she fondly reminisces on the brighter, lesser-known moments that shaped her. Working with Tucker, in particular, was “very, very surreal,” Twain says.
“Tanya Tucker was the only child star at the time in country music [when I was growing up], so that was my mother’s reference for who she believed I could be. I never did become a child star — I wouldn’t be successful till long after my mother was already gone — but I was thinking about her when I wrote that song, as I’m looking back on where I come from, the feelings and experiences of my youth and how she was my manager, my agent, my coach,” Twain says. “I was ‘Little Miss Twain’ with a huge guitar singing in bars. Tanya understood that my mother had big dreams for me and that they were coming true in such a literal way in that moment of recording with her.”
On the new record, Twain shares stories “that nobody knows,” she adds, and its imbued with the resilient spirit she found at a young age.
Credit: Courtesy Shania Twain
“I grew up really quickly. We didn’t always have money to pay the bills. I was one of the adults: getting the kids to school, making meals out of nothing — whatever was left in jars, like ketchup sandwiches — and trying to support my mother through her depression and not being able to feed us or not being able to keep us warm in the winter. She was a wonderful mother, but she couldn’t cope with not always being able to care for us the way she believed we should be cared for,” Twain says. “My music was her lifeline a lot of the time. It gave her hope that we could maybe become the Beverly Hillbillies.”
Now, Twain is more confident than ever: “I am in charge again.”
Credit: Victoria Will
For more on Shania Twain, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.
Read the full article here
