Music Monday #29: One Heart by Celine Dion

One Canadian gives way to another, moving from Bryan Adams in the previous post to Celine Dion once more, which is actually quite amusing to me considering the fact that Celine won the 1988 Eurovision Song Content as mentioned previously, and 3 years prior in 1985 the band Bobbysocks! represented Norway and won singing a song titled 'La Det Swinge', a band that Bryan Adams wrote a song for called 'No Way To Treat A Lady' which went #1 in Norway. 

2003 saw Celine Dion release 'One Heart' the third album of hers to appear on this list.  I have mentioned in previous posts that the artists I like most take chances with their career [shhh spoilers] which sometimes pays off and sometimes they don't.  One Heart was an album where Celine took a chance, she went in a new direction, without a doubt One Heart is the most dance-centric album she has released, in fact the only song she's released since that I think shares the same vibe was 'On S'est Aime A Cause' which appeared on her 'D'elles' album released in 2007.  One Heart represents a different style of music to the genres she had explored previously and it worked well.  Her voice fit perfectly with the music style.  People often discount dance music in particular when dance crosses into pop because they think it's more about the music than the lyrics and any artist that is known for their vocal styling won't fit, but I refute this assertion and One Heart demonstrates why that assumption is wrong.

The opening track is a cover of 'I Drove All Night' which is a song with a very interesting history.  It was first recorded in 1987 by Roy Orbison and was intended for release but it was held back.  In the same year, Cyndi Lauper went on to record an alternative version of the song, which again was intended for release but was held back.  Roy sadly passed away in 1988 at the age of 52 after a heart attack.  In 1989 Cyndi Lauper's version of the song was released and went on to become a huge hit.  There were reservations but eventually in 1992 Roy's version of the song was finally released.  The song then mostly dropped out of public consciousness until almost a decade later when a band named Pinmonkey released a cover, only to be followed a year later by Celine Dion.

The journey that a song can take is something that fascinates me, Celine when she started out in her career spoke only French, she performed covers of some English language songs before she could even speak English with fluency and in the early days of her career releasing albums recorded in English, covers still featured, even today she has covered songs by some artists that I have a particular fondness for notably Frank Sinatra [Shhh spoilers] and in some cases she has even collaborated with them, although sadly in Sinatra's case it had to be through the use of video editing owing to his death in 1998 again from a heart attack although unlike Orbison he had been in decline due to other health problems.  Every song is a creation though, it has a life, it has a history, and like all art what you see or what you consume when you experience it is the sum total of the journey that led up to that moment of creation, you experience a finished product to consume, but the history in itself can tell a story that makes it all the more meaningful and can change the experience.

The track that means the most to me on this album however is 'Faith' for the lyrics "Don't be afraid to feel this way, Gonna make you understand, It's not about you, cause I am the fool, Building castles in the sand" - you can probably tell this alludes to the young gay man I was chasing closeted gay guys who were coming to terms with their sexuality and expecting too much of them too soon, this shouldn't need much more explanation. 

As a gay man there is an internal conflict that occurs when it comes to who you want to date, that conflict inevitably arises when the question of closets comes into play, whether it's yours, theirs, or both, they complicate things.  For those of us who have come out, there's an understanding of how hard it is to live in the closet but also the understanding that no-one should be 'outed' because you are likely to cause a lot more damage than good if you try to do that, people should come out when they are ready.  The conflict however revolves around the element of shame that inevitably gets attached to the relationship.  Even if you are out, and feel no shame about your sexuality, dating someone who isn't, eventually leads to you taking on their shame, their hesitation and their reluctance to do certain things for fear they might be outed in the process, leads you to feel their shame projected onto you because you can't do what you want to do.  There's a very deep conversation to be had here about how far you take that concept particularly when it reaches the boundary of consent and the red line that gets crossed there by many.  This is a conversation that is too complex to have here in this post about music but suffice is to say that many gay men choose to completely write off anyone in the closet at all and move on, that has merits and demerits to it too, but we'll leave it at that.

What is relevant here however, is that the song Faith talks about someone who wants to help another understand, wants to be there for them, pledges to be be their side, but has feelings that are strong and can put the other person under pressure and fear that saying no or not being ready will mean they might lose them.  It's a complicated song that I don't think can really be understood unless you've been in that head space of a relationship that is strained that could fall apart at any moment but you both want to be together and make it work despite the complications.  In parallel the song 'Stand By Your Side' also echoes this sentiment.

Motivation means a lot when it comes to artistic creation, and as I said before, art is the sum total of the experience lived until the point it is created, in this moment it's worth reflecting on Celine's life at the time.  When she released her 'A New Day Has Come' album, a year prior she had given birth to her first child, her son René-Charles, the symbolism and the metaphors aren't lost, more than that her hiatus in 2000 had been motivated by her husband's diagnosis with Oesophageal Cancer, the significance of the lyrics to the songs on One Heart emerges in this context, the desire to be there for someone, and help them through something that despite your best efforts you can't really control and can't fix for them. 

As a gay man, Celine Dion has been an idol for me from a very young age, she was always someone that I looked up to, someone I admired, and someone I aspired to be like.  I saw strength in her, I saw determination, I saw eccentricity that once more was unapologetic, people often think she's a little crazy and she'd even admit that herself because she enjoys life, and she lives it.  There's one more album of hers to feature on this list, you can probably guess what it is if you know her discography but we'll get there in time.