IT'S ALL COMING BACK TO ME NOW – Celine Dion, 1996
As singer and songwriter go, Celine Dion and Jim Steinman were a perfect match. Dion’s tone and delivery could wrench maximum emotion out of a Beyond Burger label. Steinman wrote epic, hyper-dramatic story songs. He had already found an ideal male voice in Michael Lee Aday, who was better known to the world as Meat Loaf. Their collaborative album Bat Out of Hell took off in 1977.
Steinman had another big epic song called “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” and Meat Loaf wanted it. But Steinman thought it needed a female vocalist. So he put together a group of female singers called Pandora’s Box. With Elaine Caswell singing lead, they recorded the first version of the song in 1989.
Steinman tinkered with the arrangement a little bit for Dion, but it’s mainly her voice that puts the song over. Caswell had a very good blues-tinged voice. But this song needed the operatic grandeur that Dion gave it.
You could stand that voice up against an epic arrangement and it would never get lost. It wasn’t Dion’s first number one in the US, nor would it be her last. She basically dominated the charts for the entire decade of the 1990s. Another of her monster hits, 1996’s “All By Myself,” was also a cover, but I figure more people at least know about Eric Carmen’s original of that song, so I’m going with “It’s All Coming Back…”