Shania Twain’s 2023 album Queen of Me chased contemporary pop trends so aggressively that you could be mistaken for thinking you were listening to Meghan Trainor. Her follow-up, Little Miss Twain, corrects course with warm, rootsy arrangements that suit her current voice and recover the balance between pop immediacy and country texture that gave her best albums their singular character.
Dysphonia and the surgery Twain underwent back in 2018 to treat it have left the singer’s voice heavier and less flexible, yet most of these songs are built to maximize those changes. Opener “Stranger Things” is the glaring exception, with an eyebrow-raising amount of sour pitch and vocal fry, but even the dense, polished production on “Scary Little Thing” keeps Twain’s roughest edges from sitting at the center of the mix.
Little Miss Twain fares worst when its writing slips into the language of self-care pop. Twain’s vocal delivery on “Right Time” gives the track more nuance than its lyrics deserve, with wary pauses after “honestly” and “personally” that lend the verses a conversational tension. Flickers of banjo help keep the song buoyant, but the chorus reduces freedom from a bad relationship to drinking martinis on the beach.
Conversely, “Quit My Life” turns clichés about dirty dishes and stolen me-time into something funny, vulnerable, and catchy, while the album’s title track finds greater emotional weight in Twain’s memory of her mother predicting she would become “the next Tanya Tucker,” with Tucker herself appearing on the chorus. “Northern Town” builds its nostalgia from plain, impressionistic details from Twain’s youth—Dairy Queen cones, long trains, her uncle Sonny falling into a chair—and her weathered voice helps give those memories the weight of lived time.
It makes sense, then, that the album’s strongest moment brings those virtues together. “Rockstars” gradually adds drums, bass, and backing vocals without crowding Twain out, and her performance grows more commanding as the track builds. There is, musically speaking, nothing rock ‘n’ roll about the song, but it’s poignant for its insistence that real rock stars—and the attitude they embody—never truly grow old.
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