Ahead of hosting ACM Awards, Shania Twain announces new album, releases new song
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- Shania Twain announced her seventh album Little Miss Twain set to debut July 24.
- Twain released the lyric video for new single "Dirty Rosie" on YouTube this week.
- Twain will host the 61st ACM Awards in Las Vegas days after the album announcement.
Shania Twain announced her seventh album on Wednesday and fans can expect it to reflect a fresh assessment of the traumatic, painful childhood Twain endured before earning the crown as the top-selling female country artist of all time.
“Little Miss Twain,” will be an “homage to my roots, my youth and my mother,” the superstar announced Wednesday on Instagram. The album debuts July 24.
Twain also released the lyric video to a new single, “Dirty Rosie,” on YouTube, which she had teased earlier in the week. Twain, driving through forests in an old pick-up, sings: “You can drive a hummer, in the summer. You can even drive the ladies, in my Mercedes. But you can’t drive my truck.”
The release comes just days before Twain hosts the 61st Academy of Country Music Awards on Sunday.
“Marking her most personal work in a hallowed career of acclaimed albums, classic hits, and over 100 million albums sold worldwide, Little Miss Twain establishes a return to Shania’s roots,” says the official synopsis from Republic Records.
“The album’s lead single ‘Dirty Rosie’ is out now and introduces an album that seamlessly blends country, pop, rock, soul, and bluegrass in an artistic evolution tracing the formative experiences that led to Shania becoming one of the most beloved, influential stars of our time ...
“... (S)he’s never written something as self-referential and introspective as Little Miss Twain. The album gets to the core of her as a person and a musician, only possible with decades of hard-earned wisdom and perspective.”
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In an April 7 Instagram post the Canadian-born superstar wrote that she had been “spending more time in Canada recently and it’s been inspiring in the sweetest way.
“Spending so much time in nature and breathing in that fresh Canadian air has led to a lot of reminiscing. That and going through old family photos.”
Twain has suggested in multiple recent interviews that turning 60 last year put her in a contemplative mode. Twain’s mother and stepfather died in 1987 in a collision with a logging truck in Ontario, Canada when Shania was 22, forcing her to put her music career on hold to raise younger siblings.
“(My fans) only know Shania from my first records ... my first hit wasn’t until I was 30,” she told People. “So there’s a whole lot of Shania they don’t know about and that’s what the new music’s about.”
She said she waited until now to share more about that part of her life because she feels “really settled and at peace with a lot of the challenges and things that I’ve gone through.
“At some point in your life it’s healthy to come to peace and terms with the things that you revisit maybe a little more often than is good for you.”
In a Mother’s Day post this week she explained how she had “been spending a lot of time looking back at those years before anybody knew me as Shania Twain. Not to live in the past, but to understand it, to honour it, and to turn some of those memories into something new.
“This next chapter of music is very close to my heart. It goes back to where I came from. Back to the little girl with a guitar, a mother who believed she might have ‘the next Tanya Tucker’ on her hands, and a whole lot of life still waiting to happen.”
Country legend Tucker became famous at age 13 in 1972 with the hit “Delta Dawn.” She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2023 and still tours.
In an Instagram Story on Wednesday Twain shared a clip of one of her first TV appearances, in which she sang Tucker’s classic “Texas (When I Die).”
In her 2011 memoir, “From This Moment on,” Twain revealed the trauma of growing up poor and hungry in a home where her stepfather physically abused her mother.
It was Twain’s mother who took her to bars to perform when she was just in grade school, something Twain wasn’t always happy about, she has said. But her mother was convinced that her daughter was the next Tanya Tucker.
“I will say about the new music, that it’s very much about reflecting back on my child self, but with a lot of joy,” Twain said on the Today show this month.
“... for so many years I’ve opened up about some of the difficulties, the challenges. I want my fans also to relate to the things I talk about when it comes to heartbreak or disappointment ... I kind of feel like I’ve gone through all of my sorting out of all of those things, and I’m just looking back now at my childhood with joy..
“I’m seeing just the good things now from now on. I’m proud of my child self when I look back at myself.”
In a Mother’s Day post on Instagram, Twain wrote that she was thinking about her mother and stories that have stayed with her all her life.
“My mother was there for the very beginning of everything. She was the one driving me to sing in local bars, finding any opportunity she could for me to get experience. Maybe even get discovered. Those bar stages were my classrooms.
“Sometimes we just needed to make enough money to put gas back in the car, but to her, it was still worth it. She believed in the music. She believed it could change the course of our lives.
“She never got to see what happened later. She wasn’t there for the awards, the big stages, the moments where I would look around and think, how did I get all the way here from where I started?”
“That will always be one of the deepest sadnesses of my life, not being able to share it with my mother. But I also know this, while she was here, my music brought her joy. It was often her lifeline and gave her hope. And that means everything to me.”
Twain teased fans about “Dirty Rosie” last week.
She told Billboard the new album “was written storywise and also sonically, musically, based on a lot of reflection on my childhood, whether it’s stories reflecting back to my youth or whether it is music that influenced me most as a child and as a teen. I’ve brought all of that together.”
Hosting the ACM awards takes her back to Las Vegas, the city where she’s headlined three successful residencies since 2012. The ceremony takes place at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.
“This is fun to me. So hosting the ACMs is a chance to go celebrate all of the other artists, meet the new artists, the up and coming artists, celebrate a lot of the artists that have been rocking it the last several years that I have not been around much to say congratulations and way to go and all that kind of stuff,” she said in a statement.
“So for me, it is a chance to reconnect with my favorite genre, which is my root music country and do my best job representing my genre.”
Twain last performed in Kansas City at T-Mobile Center in July 2023 on her “Queen of Me” tour. She has not announced plans to tour with the forthcoming album.
The ACM Awards will stream live on Prime Video at 7 p.m. Central Time on Sunday. The show, which will also stream on the Amazon Music Twitch channel, is free to watch without a Prime membership.
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