<\/p>\n
NEW YORK<\/strong> \u2013 Before Shania Twain<\/a> became Shania Twain, she was a child performing in Canadian bars, singing to miners, lumberjacks, fishermen and hunters drinking the night away.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a bit more of a rugged crowd. And they were small crowds,\u201d she says in a recent interview with The Associated Press. \u201cI could only enter after the bar closed. That was after midnight because I was underage. And as long as the bar wasn\u2019t still serving, then I could go in and play while everybody was finishing up their last call.\u201d<\/p>\n It was \u201ccharacter building,\u201d she says, painting an image of a bygone era of her life in Northern Ontario and one dramatically opposed to the glitz and glamour associated with the five-time Grammy Award<\/a> winning country musician. But those days were instrumental to what became her career. \u201cI spent a lot of years dreaming about things that would eventually come but took a little while,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n As Twain describes it, her latest album, \u201cLittle Miss Twain,\u201d out Friday, is the period of her life from her earliest performances at age 8 all the way to her late-20s, when she inked her major label record deal.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s this whole gap of life that I\u2019ve never written,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted to fill in story wise, personal story wise. \u2026 It\u2019s a phase of my life that not a lot of my fans would know about.\u201d<\/p>\n Revisiting the past \u2014 in more ways than one<\/p>\n A number of the songs on \u201cLittle Miss Twain\u201d have been sitting with the singer for many years. \u201c’Rockstars’ I was writing probably 10 years ago now, and \u2018Northern Town’ is one that\u2019s been around for a long time,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The title track of the record, \u201cLittle Miss Twain,\u201d is its emotive heart \u2014 a song for her mother, who died in a car crash in 1987<\/a>, alongside her stepfather, and never got to experience her success. For Shania, it was an opportunity to reflect on \u201cmy mother being my manager and my agent, my driver and my coach, even though she couldn\u2019t sing a note,\u201d she said. \u201cShe would drive me around to all these stages, underage in the bars, and that\u2019s where I got my experience.\u201d<\/p>\n The song was one of the last ones to make the collection, she says, but \u201cit was this missing piece that came to me.\u201d That’s at least partially due to the inclusion of Tanya Tucker,<\/a> who duets with Twain on the track. <\/p>\n On the chorus, Twain sings \u201cAccording to my mother \/ I’m the next Tanya Tucker.\u201d<\/p>\n Twain says of having Tucker on the record: \u201cI don\u2019t know if I would ever really be able to explain in words what it meant and what it would have meant to my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n The song also features her son Eja D\u2019Angelo Lange on background vocals; he appears on a few of the album’s tracks. \u201cI get to fulfill a lot of things that my mother would not have been able to share with me,\u201d she says about working with her son. \u201cIt\u2019s really beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n Genre explorations from a country music giant<\/p>\n Pulling from her early years allowed Twain to focus on some of her musical loves<\/a> in and outside of country music. Listen closely and you’ll hear \u201cMotown, the country and western that my grandparents used to play like Marty Robbins\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of rock edge stuff in there. \u2018Faded Blue Jeans\u2019 is very much a bluesy rock song\u201d \u2014 it features Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme.<\/a><\/p>\n The multi-genre moments on the album, with credits that also include Ronnie Wood,<\/a> work for Twain’s current voice, which now features a wizened rasp. \u201cI don\u2019t have the little sweet sound I had years ago, but I have a new sound that I actually like,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I think I write songs a bit differently because of it.\u201d<\/p>\n