Celine Dion has “edge.”
Billboard magazine reports that the French-Canadian Adult Contemporary Queen, after wrapping up her record-breaking run at the Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace, is releasing an album that includes “an abundance of guitars and an overall tempo that is brisker, with a deliberate rock tint.”
Sound cringe-worthy? Definitely. The music world – in fact, the world at large – can do without a Celine Dion rock n’ roll album. Dion has recorded an astonishing body of epic recordings – an ocean of emoting, and a mountain of tears – with the focus squarely on her technically perfect, aggravating voice.
But with remarkable candor, Dion describes herself in the profile as a victim of her astounding range:
“Those songs are great and made me who I am today,” she says of hits like The Power of Love, Because You Loved Me, and the massive smash My Heart Will Go On. “It wasn’t a mistake, but I didn’t have a lot of choices. Do you think I wanted to hold those long notes forever and kill myself onstage every night? But everybody always sent the hardest songs to sing to me: ‘If somebody can hit those notes, it’s Celine Dion.’ And I can do it; I can hit them, baby.
“Now maybe we’re all tired of those 10-second notes—the writers, the people—and they’ve evolved, too. Maybe no one thought I was capable of doing anything else, but I’ve got Heart and Doobie Brothers and Janis Joplin and Creedence Clearwater Revival inside of me, too.”
Dion isn’t the first singer to question the validity of her past efforts. She is undoubtably the most-successful artist to do this, though.
The new perspective on her old hits begs the question: what will Celine do next? Cover Fortunate Son? Now that I would pay $150 to see.
Filed under: music | Tagged: Celine Dion
