Celine Dion - Falling Into You

Dion’s Anglo-opus. The Francophone singer’s best-selling album, sung entirely in English. Some of the songs are translations and re-recordings of French songs from her previous albums. Some of the songs are covers of songs written for different artists. Some of the songs, like smash-hit “Because You Loved Me”, were written for this album specifically.

Celine Dion is emotive, powerful, and precise on this record, and I’m not surprised by its commercial successes. One has to lean on cliches to describe her properly. Powerhouse. Force of nature. She’s such a strong presence that the Korg Triton production often struggles under her weight. Jim Steinman’s production and arrangement on “Call the Man” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” is so overwhelming and unique that one of the primary takeaways from this album was how much I wish the whole album was produced by Jim Steinman. It stands up to Dion’s force of personality and feels so much more detailed than most of the other songs on here. Other standouts to my ears include new jack swing curveball “Make You Happy” and Eric Carmen power ballad “All By Myself”. The mix is good, the cheese is strong, Dion is given the spotlight and she makes the most of it.

That all being said, I don’t know if I’m going to come back to this record on a regular basis. It’s just so much. It’s 14 tracks of full-throated love songs, 67 minutes. While there’s a decent amount of stylistic variation in the production over the course of the record, that’s not necessarily a good thing. A lot of these diva records sound more like compilations of singles than they do albums.

My copy was a little dinged up. The interior booklet portrays Dion as a 40s movie star, with the warm-colored film poster style to match. There’s some terrifically 90s graphic design work going on inside. The outside sort of signifies the opposite thing, portraying Dion as the nervous girl next door on the front cover, covering her face on the back. The CD and tray art are OK, but a little slapdash for what I’d expect from such a big commercial deal.

Falling Into You by Celine Dion is a good album, but I don’t like it.