Music Monday #7: A New Day Has Come by Celine Dion

After mentioning Celine Dion in the previous post in this series it seems only fitting to include my favourite Celine Dion album next.  'A New Day Has Come' was released in 2002 when I was at the tail end of being 13, the first real year of your teens.  The 2001/02 school year holds a lot of memories for me.  It was my third year of High School and it started against a backdrop of global events that shifted the mood substantially into the negative.  I live in the UK, so when September 11th 2001 hit we weren't attacked directly but we felt the pain and we looked on in disbelief. 

I grew up in Northern Ireland raised by parents who lived through the brunt of the Troubles and experiencing a childhood shaped by its tail end.  The threat of terrorism was something that always hung over us, I've said before my schools had 2 alarms one for fires and one for bombs with the understanding being if the fire alarm went you exited in an orderly fashion and if the bomb alarm went you got out as quick as you could and got as far from the school as you could.  That's not something that is easy to process as a child and looking back it's something that never really sinks in completely.

Still of all with the threat of terrorism that we endured, the attacks we did experience were nothing in comparison to the scale of what happened on that day, to the point that even we stood dumbfounded and could not even begin to contemplate the magnitude of what would follow.  I remember the mood of the nation shifting however, in the year that followed.  Throughout my third year of high school I and many others not out of choice became more aware of the political landscape in which we lived.  The talk of war rose and the prospect of the UK being drawn into the conflict was something became ever more real.  We were too young to be affected directly if it did happen but more than a few of our teachers started looking at us differently.  Those old enough to recall the height of the troubles were aware of what conflict does to people and there was a growing concern that the future we were supposed to be preparing for might be swapped for something much more bleak and grim.

I did what I always did at that age when I had feelings I couldn't process, I turned to music.  When it comes to contemplating a dark future and what that might entail you are probably expecting Celine Dion to be the last artist that would feature on the list, but surprisingly she was one of the first.  Nor because her music is dark but because it is the exact opposite.  I was increasingly finding myself dwelling on darkness and negative thoughts and I at least had some semblance of wisdom to seek out positivity and hope to balance out the darkness with light, and when it came to positivity and music that made me feel good, Celine Dion was and remains one of the artists I turn to if not the most prevalent.

My third year of high school also saw my routine upset, a lot of things changed in my life not just because of what was going on in the world but what was going on in the immediate surroundings.  Life was strenuous and I and my family were under a lot of pressure and stress.  Seeking a way out, and influenced by the aftermath of the attack with the shift in UK politics that occurred my parents were looking to new horizons, they viewed a several properties in the Republic of Ireland and their determination to move from Northern Ireland to the Republic grew, for a time this looked increasingly likely, although this never worked out in the end, spoiler alert but we stayed in Northern Ireland.  Despite not happening in the end, the hope of change and new opportunities was something that provided a metaphorical crutch to make the journey easier.

A New Day Has Come, not just in the title track but in the others too reinforced this feeling of looking to a brighter future beyond the darkness.  I know you might be thinking if you have been reading my posts on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] that this sounds a lot like Emotional Mapping, planning out a more positive mental state and then focusing on it rather than what you are living through in the present - and you'd be right.  This is an example of a time in my life where I unconsciously and intuitively employed that technique, but with age we tend to discard the things we did in our youth giving them less credit.  Your personal growth tends to lead to arrogance that views past versions of yourself as unknowing and naive when it might be more prudent to accept that in their naivety they could have tapped into something that we actively convince ourself is irrelevant when the reality is that if we just tried the things we oppose so vehemently we might actually find they do work.

A New Day Has Come also has another somewhat less poignant significance for me in that it includes the track 'Aun Existe Amor' which is a Spanish track that literally translates as 'Love Still Exists' - this was the first Spanish track I ever heard Celine sing and I loved it, and the more I listened to it the more the words sank in to the point where I could recite the lyrics - I hadn't got a clue what they meant, I didn't speak Spanish, I had never studied it, my High School taught Irish and French the former I studied for 5 years.  I loved learning Irish although I never used it after High School and today I would struggle to have even a basic conversation with it, but hearing Spanish performed by Celine piqued my interest.  Thus began a very long journey that I still pursue today although again I pursue learning Spanish, as well as French, and German, as a hobby, something done for pleasure as I have no real use for them and I don't get any opportunity to use them.  I can still recite the lyrics to the song however, at least now I know what they mean.