Céline Dion
Genuine at all moments regardless of what the emotional soundscape demands, a consummate performer (as only the youngest of 14 siblings could be), and possessed of a crystalline laser of a voice, Céline Dion is one of those entertainers who has been part of modern discourse for so long that she is simply part of the culture. She’s a figure known throughout the world, the bridge between Streisand and Madonna and Britney and Gaga. She dives into the heart of a song and reshapes herself to fit it, whether the mode is ’90s song-machine pop bliss like “That’s the Way It Is,” the steel-cage-match drag-show drama of her Streisand duet “Tell Him,” or the deeply tragic EC Comics twist of “Le Fils de Superman.” She has the gifts of a peerless actress, and she invests them in each new number. Sure, anyone could do “Baby Shark” with James Corden, but Dion held focus when dueting with Miss Piggy on “Something So Right” in Muppets Most Wanted — and that song was simultaneously the “What I Did for Love” and the “Somewhere That’s Green” for La Piggy.
A lot has happened for everyone in the six years since that film’s release. Before Dion finished her second record-setting Las Vegas residency, her manager/husband René Angélil died of a heart attack following an ongoing battle with esophageal cancer in 2016. (If you haven’t seen her 2016 performance of Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” at the Billboard Music Awards, please take a moment and head over to YouTube and do so.)
As far as albums fueled by the act of grieving go, Dion’s newest English-language album Courage (also the namesake of the tour that brings her to Nashville on Monday) is her 808s & Heartbreak. Just look at its cover, packed with more Phoenix energy and dramatic power than any cinematic attempt at the Jean Grey story has managed. We’ve been allowed glimpses into the process of recentering oneself here and there — hear “Recovering,” written for Dion by her friend P!nk, as well as several of the tracks recorded for 2016’s Encore un Soir album. But Courage is willing to go there, and it bears witness. “Baby,” one of the three songs Sia wrote for the project, burns deep in the soul.
Dion has that Karen Carpenter gift — she’s able to soothe even when singing of unimaginable sadness. She’s always at home with a beltable melody and a tale of some form of superhuman love. And whether it’s Titanic and the unsinkable “My Heart Will Go On,” “Michael’s Song” and “Listen to the Magic Man” (in English and French) for The Peanut Butter Solution, or Deadpool 2’s unexpected “Ashes,” she presides over movie theme songs as if taking up the baton from Irene Cara herself. Dion finds the emotional kernel we keep buried in the hippocampus, or the gallbladder, or wherever secret desires steep, and nourishes it, blows it up as big as the sky itself, and makes it into something manageable.
There are lots of artists who are just as genuinely enjoyable as they are ironically so. There’s even a whole book in the 33 1/3 series — by journalist Carl Wilson, it’s subtitled A Journey to the End of Taste — about how Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love album frustrates the binaries that music snobs have measured the world against for millennia. But Céline Dion is serving looks, fueling memes (Céline memes being a perfectly respectable internet wormhole to spend some time with) and living her best life. And it doesn’t matter if you plan to view the proceedings through some sort of distancing filter of irony, because as a Canadian, she has been collapsing that ironic distance for a career spanning multiple decades.
A Céline Dion show is something special. Will there be tender ballads, soul-shaking melisma and wrenching moments of the deepest emotional resonance? You better believe it. Unexpected covers? Most certainly. And if advance word is to be believed, this tour’s French song — she tends to perform one per show — is the magnificent “Tous Les Blues Sont Écrits Pour Toi” from 1998’s Francophone masterpiece S’il Suffisait d’Aimer. This is the kind of deep-cut resurrection that longtime fans dream of (like 1996’s “I Love You” or 1987’s “Délivre-Moi,” if anyone on Dion’s crew is reading), and it’s the kind of effortless touch of showmanship that has let a young Québecoise become an international phenomenon.
Every concert is 20,000 different shows, because each person in attendance is their own unique fractured mirror, worn and split by time, and entropy, and the sheer enervating horror of the world. Céline Dion is the light, refracted by our own emotional cracks, leaving the audience made whole for three- or four-minute slices of feeling, illuminated from without.
To get you in the mood for the show, here's a YouTube playlist of some choice cuts exploring Dion's range. Be aware that the 11th video in the 12-track set is NSFW, unless you've got a really cool office.
