“D’eux”, the best-selling French-language album in history, was born from the meeting of Jean-Jacques Goldman with Céline Dion, and left behind some great hits in French (including “Pour que tu m’aimes encore”) in a career dominated by the English language.
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In partnership with the exhibition It’s a song that resembles us – Worldwide hits of French-speaking popular music At the Cité internationale de la langue française in Villers-Cotterêts, these chronicles look in detail at each of the stories presented there.
For Americans, it’s “the French album.” And in hindsight, you could say that the definite article, “the,” is there because it’s the only French album they bought. It’s true that in 1995, Céline Dion made some unique moves in her career in the United States. She sang in French for the first time on TV shows Good Morning America on ABC and The Tonight Show on NBC. And For you to love me again will often be the only song in his native language during his English concerts.
In 2019, during her last show in Las Vegas, Celine Dion recalled that this song was written by Jean-Jacques Goldman and that it is the most important of her career in French. The album Two will be the best-selling French-language album in history, in France and worldwide: 4.4 million copies in France and more than 5 million copies abroad. Beyond the numbers, there is the magical encounter of the most powerful singer-songwriter in France, with his own records, as well as with songs he gives to Johnny Hallyday, Patricia Kaas, Florent Pagny and others, and Céline Dion, a star in French wherever French is spoken, and for several years now on an irresistible upward trajectory in English. Goldman offers to write her an album, and it will be that album.
In this episode of This song reminds me of usyou hear excerpts from:
Celine Dion, For you to love me again, 1995
Celine Dion, For you to love me again (in public in Las Vegas), 2019
Celine Dion, I don’t know, 1995
Celine Dion, I’ll go wherever you will go, 1995
Celine Dion, Stolen, 1995
Celine Dion, It’s What It Takes, 1996
Jean-Jacques Goldman, For you to love me again, 1998
Celine Dion, For you to love me again, 1995
You can also extend this column with the book This song reminds me of us published by Heritage Publishing.
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