The Singles Jukebox

In which Céline Dion looks to Freddie Mercury for an elegy.

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[4.89]David Moore: Enough sap even to make Freddie Mercury grimace, while Céline Dion does an okay Céline Dion, closer to Ana Gasteyer. I assume Stirling is a fiddler of some renown, but both solos I caught got swallowed in the surrounding molasses.
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Katie Gill: Y’all, I’m gonna just ramble about Céline Dion and about this song for the longest time but if you don’t know the context of both, then you only know half the story and only half of why this song is absolutely wonderful. On January 14, 2016, Céline Dion’s husband of over twenty years Rene Angélil died of complications with cancer. Two days later her brother died, also of cancer. At that time, Céline was headlining a Las Vegas residency. She took time off for a month and you know what Céline did? On February 23, Céline returned to that Las Vegas stage and she sang her fucking heart out. On May 22, 2016, Céline performed this song at the Billboard Music Awards, her first public performance outside of Caesars Palace. She nailed it. Yes, the studio arrangement loses some of the sheer power and force her live performance had. Yes, the Autotune is visible at certain points in the song. Yes, I’m sure that other reviewers here are gonna make the inevitable comparison to Freddie Mercury, the original singer of this Queen song, and the wonderful story of how, dying from complications due to HIV/AIDS, when it was time to record the vocals for this song, Freddie knocked down a measure of vodka and stated “I’ll fucking do it, darling.” “The Show Must Go On” is a song with history. Céline recognizes that. This performance, this version acknowledges that history as Céline takes that pain and pushes it through in an arrangement that is pure Céline. That strain in her voice as she hits those high notes reflects the strain of everything Céline’s been through. Easily the best moment of the show is when she sings during the bridge, over Stirling’s masterful violin, pushing her voice into something that sounds downright raw and wonderfully rough, two things that you don’t normally associate with Céline Dion — hell, compare this to her other single right now, “Encore un soir” where she sounds practically sweet. But, y’all, if she’s going to sound raw and rough then there is no better time. And yeah, Céline’s performed this song before 2016. But it just takes on such a stronger weight and such a stronger meaning as she sings it now. The show must go on and baby, it’s fucking going.
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Hannah Jocelyn: Céline’s comeback “Love Me Back To Life” wasn’t exactly a smash, but the Sia-penned single still gets stuck in my head long after the rest of the world has forgotten about it. Meanwhile, Lindsey Stirling’s violin can soar when put in the right place (s/o to Shatter Me). This nearly note-for-note Queen cover does not initially serve them well. The production and engineering, by MOR extraordinaire Humberto Gatica, is dull, vocals pushed so high the mix sounds unbalanced and the instrumental begins to sound like the clones of the original on Spotify. Lindsey doesn’t really try to mimic the bombast of Brian May’s guitar solo, or if she does she renders it difficult to discern. In short, everything about this felt unnecessary until I found out the real reason behind Celine’s cover. Listening back, Céline’s performance sounded more powerful, and suddenly, the cover felt like it needed to exist. I just wish the rest of the arrangement matched her urgency. 
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Anthony Easton: I am interested in the move from background musician getting equal billing to a legend, and the power of YouTube and reality television to make that happen. I am also interested in a moment of great personal grief when emotional over-performance might be legitimate and is made this subtle (I mean, not very subtle, but less over the top). This relative underplaying of this deepens problems of biography. That most of the melodrama rests on Stirling also suggests a kind of torch passing.
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Alfred Soto: I’m not sure why Céline Dion sings as if she’s been chewing a delicious piece of chalk: the vowels are as harsh as consonants, while consonants are a dream she once had. The guitars sound like no one has ever heard one. The drum kit is stuffed with cotton balls. To eulogize her beloved husband, she turns to a Queen ballad written by a diva for future divas, but nobody here except Lindsey Stirling’s acerbic solo is at full strength. There isn’t a believable moment in it.
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Thomas Inskeep: Dion is a (deserved) legend, and her performance of Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” on last month’s Billboard Music Awards was an emotional triumph, as this year she’s already suffered through the deaths of her husband and brother. This studio version, however, isn’t as toothy, but is instead a bit too tamed, simultaneously over-the-top and oddly muted. Bombast is fine, but there’s nothing much behind the bombast in this case. Stirling, meanwhile, is a violin show pony, an instrumental Josh Groban, and completely irrelevant here.
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Peter Ryan: As an adolescent I amassed a collection of all of her English-language releases from Unison through One Heart, memorized them, shouted along with abandon. The cassettes and CDs were lost in some teenage purge of any potentially incriminating materials, around which time they became obsolete anyway. Since then collective nostalgia and a certain type of critic have joined forces to give her the inevitable middle-aged icon rehabilitation treatment; meanwhile she’s kept her attentions mostly on Vegas, periodically emerging with stuff like this, albeit usually a touch less retrograde. She’s always been open about her reliance on other people’s words, so it’s fitting that she is now ostensibly presenting her least filtered, most transparently wounded self through this coveriest of covers. The original is inextricable from the circumstances of its origin, and shifting the perspective to grieving spouse modulates the way the song plumbs desperate rage, defiance, terror; but if that’s your quibble, its near-constant decontextualization at the hands of the competition shows means that ship sailed long ago. As a Céline Dion single, it’s meh — the reverent arrangement is straight out of her show, where it’s been a standby for years; it won’t put her on American radio in 2016, not even adult contemporary; and she’s still less stilted and more vocally-nuanced in French. But — and maybe I’m cutting her some slack because first and foremost I’m still a fan — this is Céline being a consummate pop fan in her time of personal crisis, stripping her favorites for parts and comfort, wrestling as publicly as she ever will with her anguish and the process of rebuilding. That’s what this is really about. Also 2:43, wherein she definitively proves that she’s more metal than yr fav.
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Cassy Gress: Céline’s spent most of the last decade or so in Vegas residencies, and I can hear it. I know it’s not really fair to compare an artist’s current output 1:1 with things they were doing twenty years ago, but when I hear this, I see Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liza Minnelli or Patti Lupone: dramatic legends, mascara smudged, spotlighted on an empty stage, blazing through their final number. But what I wanted to hear, with those violins and matte drums, was her Bonnie Tyler song, from a time when her belting wasn’t so raspy and her breath control was better, and her accent was bizarrely less Québécois. And now I’ve gone and made myself sad.
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Jer Fairall: Having re-read Carl Wilson’s volume on Let’s Talk About Love some time since the last Céline single, I’m once again willing to try approaching my country’s tackiest export with fresh ears until I’m reminded once again just how much her voice grates against my particular ears like a scouring pad. Her latest wins sympathy points, of course, but is a typical miscalculation of taste: shouldn’t something like a tribute (or at least a respectable period of silence) be the thing that follows her very recent losses, rather than a showboating cover of someone else’s tragic final statement? We all grieve in our own way, I guess.
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