My Heart Will Go On
(Theme song in "Titanic") "In April (1997), Celine remembers, composer James Horner came to Las Vegas and proposed a project to Rene : 'I'm writing the music for a movie about the Titanic'. The three of us met in a suite of the Caesar's Palace. Horner played My Heart Will Go On on the piano. On his back, I was making signs to Rene, pouts, I was looking sternly at him, so that he understood I didn't want this song : I really didn't want to record it. First, I didn't like the song, he couldn't sing right, it wasn't really alright on the piano at the moment, I had already performed several songs for movies, one more? We wanted to take a break, another project? More especially as director James Cameron didn't want any songs for his movie. We weren't in the middle of the song that Rene was pretending not to understand me. When Horner turned towards us, he said : 'In one month, we will be in New York, at the Hit Factory, where Celine records her new album Let's Talk About Love. If you give us an orchestral track, she could make a model, then Cameron could listen to it. It would be, I think, the best way to convince him.'"
"One month later, James Horner was at the Hit Factory in New York with his orchestral track. He told me with many details the story of the movie. I began to feel the atmosphere of the movie... There is a scene with a couple of old people who are hugging, who are seeing the water come in from under the door and who are deciding to go to bed, and who are going to die together... And there is also a mother who is singing lullabies to her children, and she knows that they're all going to die... And then I imagined it. And on that day, I wasn't totally in top shape vocally and usually I don't take caffeine when I sing, but here it was a model 'no things to worry' so I took a black coffee with two sugars... Then I sang, there were all the Sony team, Tommy Mottola, John Doelp, Vito Luprano... Everybody knew, since the first take, that we had a big hit."
"But the model, the coffee and the two sugars remained the original, I never recorded the song again : the model is on the disc. They built the orchestration with my voice... I never recorded it again, so much so that the tremolo is faster on the song than on stage, than usual, because of the caffeine."
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