Shania Twain Finally Plays Her Dream Gig: A Tiny Dive Bar in Toronto

By Karen Bliss

Karen Bliss

Shania Twain always dreamed of playing Toronto’s legendary Horseshoe Tavern. The Queen of Country Pop, who has long headlined arenas and recently opened 12 stadium shows in London for Harry Styles, finally got to perform at the Queen Street landmark on Friday night, dropping into a venue that holds 500 people, testing out songs from her forthcoming album, Little Miss Twain, and delivering the pop smashes that helped sell more than 100 million albums worldwide.

The evening was filled with stories about growing up in Timmins, Ontario, “the North” — memories about her mother, her father, his truck, driving at age 10, her ripped blue jeans, her fantasy man, and other deeply personal things that became the basis for the new songs. The lyrics meant so much to Twain that several times after performing the song with the band, she sang verses again on her own, just to make sure the crowd heard them.

The $40 tickets (30 bucks in U.S. dollars) for the underplay sold out in minutes and were non-transferrable. A small number were set aside for contest winners, industry, media, and guests. The diehards who couldn’t get in listened from the sidewalk, but were unable to catch a glimpse of the five-time Grammy winner: the stage is located far in the backroom.

“Quick story,” the chatty singer, now 60, said after opening the 75-minute set with two of her biggest hits, “Come On Over” and “Any Man of Mine,” and already declaring this “the best night ever.” Sitting on a stool with her sparkly, silver acoustic guitar, in front of the venue’s glittery backdrop and giant logo, she looked beautiful in a black bodysuit, shrug, tights, and knee-high suede boots, her layered hair styled with loose curls.

“I grew up in northern Ontario. The dream in my little bar bands at the time, all through my youth and my teens, and even into my 20s, was to play the Horseshoe Tavern,” she said. “But we just weren’t established enough, so…this is my first time in the Horseshoe Tavern.”

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The 78-year-old music venue, still standing amid the crumbling history around it, including the construction of a subway stop next door, has hosted countless legends on its stage. On the country side alone, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, and Willie Nelson all played there; along with Canadian rising star Josh Ross. Though it’s no longer strictly a country bar — the Rolling Stones, the Ramones, Foo Fighters, and Bryan Adams are just some of the rock acts who’ve graced the stage—original owner Jack Starr built it into the “Grand Ole Opry of the North” in the early days.

Notably, the late Stompin’ Tom Connors — whom Twain talked about last month onstage at another underplay, the Shacklewell Arms pub in London, and imitated his famed foot-stomping — was such a fixture at “The ‘Shoe” that he is immortalized in a mural shared with the Tragically Hip’s late singer Gord Downie on the wall by the stage.

“I’m finally here, and I feel like it’s a very full circle moment,” Twain continued. “This is so historical. It’s a privilege to be here — finally.”

Backed by a six-piece band, that included four women and her longtime music director Brent Barcus, Twain strummed guitar for nearly all the songs. She apologized to the crowd for the “go with the flow” nature of the evening, which included some tiny tech requests, and half-joked that she didn’t know all the lyrics yet because she’d just recorded them.  

Teeing up the roots-rocker “Dirty Rosie,” the lead single and opening track from Little Miss Twain, due July 24, she described it as being inspired by “my favorite truck,” which also appears in the music video for the song. “I grew up on the backroads and gravel roads of Timmins, Ontario, deep in the bush, and that’s where I learned to drive,” she told the crowd, explaining that she was 10 years old when she got behind the wheel of her dad’s pickup. “I thought, ‘Someday, if I ever have my own truck, it won’t be shiny and clean; it would be a truck that had purpose.’”

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The song “I’d Be Loving Me,” she said, came out of a jam with musicians who had played on Motown records — “It’s my soul side coming out” — and spoke again about her youth and upbringing and what the big city of Toronto meant.

After the lilting soul ballad, Twain performed the harmony-heavy “Stranger Things,” another track off the forthcoming LP. “This is the song that I wrote about the whole Little Miss Twain album. It’s a reflection on my life growing up in the North, in Ontario,” she said. “There’s snow and trees and lakes and rivers and gold in the ground and all the things that we are about Ontario.”

At one point, Twain reminisced about her childhood dream guy who inspired the song — imagining a lumberjack-type partner who could do all the things she could do. “I mean, I can chop wood, I can trap. Ontario girls, I can change tires,” she said, describing a man twice her size who filled up a door frame, like a Daniel Boone figure. “So, I wrote this song all about the fantasy man when I was a kid.”

Twain then went back to the classics, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “You’re Still the One,” the crowd excited, phones up in full force, singing along, before she played “Faded Blue Jeans,” a new track that features Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme. There was no metaphor here: The song is about Twain’s hole-filled denim that repeatedly came back into style over the years, and the life moments she had while wearing them.

While Twain talked a lot about her father, it was her mother who loomed largest over the night. “My driver, my manager and my agent,” is how Twain described her. “Her dream was that I would be a childhood country music star. Now, I would never hit that mark, and my mother would not live to see me, ever, have success. But her dream was that I would be the next Tanya Tucker.” (Tucker sings on the album’s title track.)

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