Loved Me Back To Life – Celine Dion
Loved Me Back To Life
Celine Dion
3.49 min • Columbia • September 1, 2013
Little Bastard reviews
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I try not to have guilty pleasures. I stand up for the music I like, regardless of other people’s opinions … but if I HAD a guilty pleasure, it would be Celine Dion.
Since my mum bought her breakthrough album The Colour Of My Love in the mid ’90s (as a teenager I played ‘Misled’ more than I care to remember), I’ve been fascinated by her powerful voice, even succumbing to seeing her in concert a few years ago.
Having outed myself as a Celine fan I must admit that, apart from some isolated tracks over the past few years (I did quite like ‘A New Day Has Come’, and from the same album, ‘Rain, Tax (It’s Inevitable)’ (despite its slightly dodgy title) but I haven’t thought that her output has been particularly strong. For this reason, ‘Love Me Back To Life’ was a complete surprise. I’d heard a rumour it had a “dubstep beat”, which could either have been an amazing decision, or the musical version of “mutton dressed as lamb”. Luckily, it’s the former. The link to the song drops into my inbox when I am in a shoe shop with my Mum, and my curiosity to hear Celine’s new direction meant that it couldn’t wait till I got home. So, there I am, walking around Pavers in Gloucester Quays, my phone clamped to my ear, waiting to see what this has in store for me. And I wasn’t disappointed.
Co-written by Sia Fuller, one of the greatest and most underrated singer songwriters of the past few decades, the song has modern but not desperate production, and rather than sounding like Celine is trying to be edgy and current, it simply recalls how chart friendly her music was over ten years ago. Sia’s melodies are unmistakable, and Celine’s voice sails over the syncopated drums and strings, and the whole thing makes me dance around like a loon, singing along to the chorus before I’ve even left Pavers. (I swear one of these days my antics will get me unceremoniously thrown out of somewhere.) Sia is hot property as a songwriter at the moment, and all I can do is thank my lucky stars that she didn’t waste this song on a piece of pop fluff like Rihanna. Not so much an artist with something to say as an old fashioned pop star who was the incredible voice box for someone else’s ideas, Celine and Sia are a match made in heaven, and this song is a testament to that!
The forthcoming album, which includes collaborations with Babyface and Eg White, could be one of the biggest surprises of the year. Finally, after years of middle of the road music, Celine Dion is no longer just for my Mum.