Shania Twain has five more stories left to tell, and they all lead to Nashville. The country-pop star announced Little Miss Twain — The Places I’ll Go, a companion set to July’s Little Miss Twain, arriving Oct. 9.
“In giving you the stories of my youth it made me want to share more from those days with you,” Twain wrote on X. The five new tracks, she said, “paint the full picture leading up-to me signing my recording contract in Nashville.”
That contract is the hinge of the whole project. Twain grew up in Timmins, Ont., was singing in honky-tonks as a teenager and signed with Mercury Nashville before her self-titled debut landed in 1993 — the record that opened a run of more than 100 million albums sold worldwide.
The original Little Miss Twain, released July 24, was her seventh studio album and her most autobiographical: 15 tracks cutting across country, pop, rock, soul and bluegrass, with guests including Tanya Tucker, Josh Homme, The War and Treaty and Ronnie Wood. She leaned into the era during the rollout, playing an intimate club show at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern, the kind of room she played before anyone knew her name.
Critics praised it. The charts did not.
Little Miss Twain debuted at No. 131 on the Billboard 200, the lowest-charting studio album of her career, moving about 11,600 equivalent units in its first week. Her 2023 album Queen of Me opened at No. 10; 2002’s Up! and 2017’s Now both went to No. 1. The new set also bowed at No. 26 on Top Country Albums and No. 20 on the Billboard Canadian Albums chart.
Twain has been candid that she expected a different reception. She told Billboard Canada the record holds “a lot of things that I wouldn’t normally write about as a commercial songwriter,” and said ahead of release that she was “full of anxiety and excitement.”
Five more songs aren’t built to chase a chart position. They’re built to close a loop — from a girl singing for tips in northern Ontario, in a place where, as she has put it, you don’t go anywhere on a horse, you go on a snowmobile, to the day a label in Tennessee handed her a pen.
The Places I’ll Go arrives Oct. 9.
