Shania Twain looks back to Timmins roots in new ELLE Canada cover story

The September cover comes less than a month after Little Miss Twain, a deeply personal album that revisits Shania Twain’s childhood and early years performing in Timmins.

Shania Twain’s new album, Little Miss Twain, looks back at her childhood and early performing years in Timmins, Ont.

Photo: Timothy White / Universal Music Canada

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Shania Twain is looking back to northern Ontario and the years before stadium tours, Diamond albums and international fame in a new cover story released Monday by ELLE Canada.

Twain is the magazine’s September 2026 cover star, with the issue hitting newsstands Aug. 17. The accompanying profile, “Shania Twain’s Homecoming is Here,” centres on her seventh studio album, Little Miss Twain, and the childhood and early performing years in Timmins that inspired much of it.

Released July 24, the album traces Twain’s childhood and teenage years in Canada and the mix of musical influences she heard before becoming one of the world’s biggest country-pop stars, according to Universal Music Canada.

“It’s such a full circle experience for me mentally and emotionally,” Twain said in the label’s album release. “The stories come from a time in my life where so many styles of music were influencing me and shaping how I hear music.”

Those beginnings were far removed from the venues Twain plays today.

Twain grew up in Timmins, a northern Ontario mining city that still celebrates her as one of its hometown stars. Long before her recording career, she was performing in local bars. Universal Music says the title Little Miss Twain reaches back as far as her days singing late at night in bars at eight years old.

The new album deliberately returns to that period. Universal has described it as Twain’s most autobiographical album, covering the experiences, sounds and memories that formed her before she was famous.

The title track reaches particularly far into her family history. Twain has said it recalls her mother’s belief that her daughter could become the next Tanya Tucker. Tucker appears on the recording herself.

Twain also revisited those early barroom years ahead of the album’s release.

On July 17, she played a one-night show at Toronto’s roughly 500-capacity Horseshoe Tavern, with Universal billing the performance beforehand as a return to the kind of Ontario bar stage where she began performing decades earlier.

Earlier that month, Twain had wrapped a 12-night run as Harry Styles’ special guest at Wembley Stadium in London.

The shows ran from June 12 to July 4, with Wembley listing Twain as special guest throughout the residency. She later continued on to perform in Limerick, Ireland, before returning to Canada for the Horseshoe Tavern appearance.

Twain has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide and won five Grammy Awards. But Little Miss Twain turns its attention to a period when none of that had happened yet: a child and teenager in Timmins learning songs, playing bars and absorbing the country, rock, R&B and other music that would eventually shape her own sound.

That past remains at the centre of the new ELLE Canada profile, released less than a month after the album itself — a Canadian homecoming story from an artist whose summer has otherwise included 12 nights on one of the biggest stages in the world.