Celine in top form in comeback CD

It has been a long six years since Celine Dion released an album. Her last one was Taking Chances back in 2007. It was not that she had been idle and just relaxing all that time. In fact, she was working really hard. The Canadian songbird spent five of these past years headlining one of the most successful shows in the history of Las Vegas. It was a great, I am sure, also lucrative, career move. She was already the biggest-selling recording artist of the time.  So, why not also become the biggest seller in Vegas and break some box-office records. It also kept the fans who filled up the Ceasar’s Palace nightly terribly delighted.  But sad to say, it also deprived them and us of new songs by Celine.

And you know how Celine is when she makes recordings. The albums just keep on selling and selling and selling. No list of the most popular songs of the past two decades will be complete without several by Celine.  Think of songs like Beauty And The Beast, The Power Of Love, Think Twice, To Love You More, That’s The Way It Is, Don’t Save It All For Christmas Day, I’m Your Angel, Immortality, When I Need You, It’s All Coming Back To Me, All By Myself, That’s The Way It Is, Alone, The Prayer, One Heart and many others including one of the biggest selling, most awarded songs of all time, My Heart Will Go On from the motion picture Titanic.

I am sure that being an artist she also missed the thrill of creating something new and then finding out that the public likes it enough to make it a big hit. So this must be the reason why she went all out to make her latest album truly special. She still has what it takes and more. Titled Loved Me Back To Life, the collection has a new very hip sound that augurs well for her success these next few years.  The most obvious change is how she now sings mostly from the lower registers. Celine’s early hits virtually created a whole generation of birit babies. It is good for those girls to find out that songs can also be in a minor key and still sound great.

The result is more pop, spiced with lots of R&B and a little hip-hop. Most amazing are the covers, which I must say are difficult songs to pull off because of the memorable original versions. Water And A Flame, done by Daniel Merriweather and Adele, with Celine in a different voice; Overjoyed, a wonderful duet with the songwriter who did the original recording, Stevie Wonder; and At Seventeen, Celine’s heartfelt cover of the phenomenal song by Janis Ian, produced by Babyface and certainly one of the album’s best cuts.

The new songs are equally strong, most notably the new single, Incredible, a most refreshing duet with Ne-Yo, who also composed and produced and what I see as a future hit, Always Be Your Girl, also produced by Babyface.  There are also Loved Me Back To Life; Somebody Loves Somebody; Breakaway; Save Your Soul; Didn’t Know Love; Thank You; Thankful; and Unfinished Songs, a new composition by Diane Warren who did Celine’s big selling Because You Loved Me.

News has it that Celine has scheduled more dates in Las Vegas. It might take a while again before she goes back to the recording studio. But for now, Loved Me Back To Life has more than enough songs to keep the fans who cannot afford the Vegas shows very happy.

Ordinary Love bags Globe’s Best Song award

The kids are not happy that Idina Menzel’s song from Frozen, Let It Go, lost out at the Golden Globe Awards. But still, the Best Song Award could not have gone to a more worthy recipient. The awards ceremony held last Sunday evening, Jan. 12, proclaimed Ordinary Love, the theme song from the motion picture Nelson Mandela, A Long Walk To Freedom. It was performed by U2 in the soundtrack and was written by the group, Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr. and producer Brian Burton, who, if I remember right did the last Gorrilaz album.

The other nominees were Atlas from Hunger Games by Coldplay; Please Mr. Kennedy from Inside Llewelyn Davis by Justin Timberlake, Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver; Sweeter Than Fiction by Taylor Swift from the Paul Potts biopic One Chance. Maybe one of them will have better luck at the Academy Awards. We should be getting the list of Oscar nominees soon.