FREEDOM AT FIFTY
Dion in control of her success
Turning 50 is a big deal, and people often mark it with a major bash.
But not Céline Dion. She claims it’s no biggie.
In fact, the hardest-working woman in showbiz planned to spend the red-letter day — Friday, March 30 — at Las Vegas’s Colosseum at Caesars Palace, doing exactly what she’s been doing on so many nights since she was a teenager: singing on stage. That makes perfect sense: entertaining is what Dion does.
(That birthday plan was scrapped Wednesday when news came that she would need “a minimally invasive surgical procedure” to correct a hearing problem. Her Vegas residency is expected to resume on May 22.)
In a recent interview with Stellar, an Australian magazine, Dion downplayed the importance of the anniversary.
“I’m not a birthday girl, not even when I was 20,” she said. “To be honest, I’d rather be doing a show. But five is my lucky number, so I’m quite excited to turn 50.”
I’m not buying that argument. I think it’s a big deal for her and for anyone who cares about Céline Dion.
When you’re about to celebrate five decades, it’s almost always a time to take stock of your life, and Dion isn’t immune to that urge. She has clearly been in taking-stock mode for a good few years now, leading to her muchnoted transformation over the past five years or so, as the songbird from Charlemagne morphed from being a passive pop star just following orders to a woman ready to take charge of her life both on and off stage.
Her story really is an empowerment narrative. I like to call it the emancipation of Céline. But it’s an empowerment story with a twist, and the twist is that Dion is one seriously unusual person, with gusts to being more than a little wacky. And I mean that as a compliment.
As one exhibit of her one-of-a-kindness, there was the surreal encounter Dion and I had last summer when she dropped by the Browns shoe store downtown to launch her line of handbags. She started by lampooning my French accent, broke into song (one from Rihanna, one from Tom Petty), said she loved me and wondered aloud if I wanted to go on a date with her.
It was a hilarious moment, but it was also a strange moment. Pop stars are usually way more guarded than that, way more controlled, but not Dion.
For several decades — say, from the age of 15 to 40 — everything Dion said and did was closely monitored by her husband and manager, René Angélil. That’s not to say she was an unwilling participant — she truly did love Angélil, and was happy to follow the advice of a much older man who knew the entertainment biz inside out. And that strategy worked, helping to turn her into one of the most influential singers in the world.
But things started changing, and not just after Angélil’s death in January 2016. As early as 2011, it was clear the old, docile Céline was in the past. I’ve done interviews with Dion dating back to the spring of 1990, just before the launch of her first English album, Unison, and when I talked to her for a half-hour on the phone in 2011, I discovered a new, more forceful, more in-control Céline Dion.
She was also more willing than ever before to talk frankly about her own life, and we had a revealing chat about the old Janis Ian hit At Seventeen, which Dion was covering at the time. She talked of how that song spoke directly to her, capturing exactly how she felt as an unhappy, lonely, awkward teen girl.
The world caught on to the new Céline in the past two years, following the death of Angélil. Dion collaborated with hip fashion designer Law Roach, who upped her cool quotient, and then she started showing up at the Paris fashion shows to flaunt her new stylish look. Last summer she had tongues wagging when she included a sexy pas de deux with a hot male dancer in her European show.
By the time Canadian hip-hop superstar Drake proclaimed at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards that she was “very iconic” and that he was contemplating getting a Céline tattoo, Dion had become cool.
And she’s enjoying her new freedom. Last year she parted ways with manager Aldo Giampaolo, who had been hand-picked by Angélil as his successor to steer her career, and she is by all accounts now making the big business decisions herself.
At Browns last summer, she loved talking up this new reality.
“Let me be clear: c’est moi le boss,” Dion said. “I’m not playing bossy. I am the boss.” Ba-da-boom!
“What’s going on? I’m enjoying myself,” she said at Browns. “I went through a lot, and I’m not the only one. People have gone through a lot, and so they probably understand what I’m saying right now. Sometimes when you go through a lot, whether it’s disappointment or a loss, there is a force that takes over when you believe. And I’m such a believer.”
So who knows what 50-something Dion will get up to? When I spoke to her in the summer of 2016, just before her series of 10 shows at the Bell Centre, she told me how she now sat in on all the meetings with her managers and agents, and that she would often drive her associates crazy with her outside-the-box ideas. She went on to say she’d love to do a concert featuring her least-known songs, and that she dreams of going out and singing her favourite tunes from the Doobie Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and AC/DC.
She might not be singing Thunderstruck any time soon, but the fact that she’s even fantasizing about it is pretty tantalizing.
In short, Dion has become a much more interesting person in the past few years, although it could be argued her francophone audience already knew that more intriguing Céline from early on: her franco material has been way less predictable for ages now, and on stage en français, she’s been pretty darn funny for a long time.
But will her offbeat personality ever manifest itself in Dion’s music? That is la question qui tue. Again, she has done some great work in the language of Brel — most notably the brilliant 1995 album D’eux, built around the songs of Jean-Jacques Goldman. Those of us who are familiar with her work in both languages have been waiting more than 20 years for the Englishlanguage equivalent of D’eux.
Might that be coming now that Dion is calling the shots? Maybe. Forget AC/DC — I’d love to see Dion Sings Costello, where Elvis Costello composes a set of songs specifically designed for her. How cool would that be? And I bet Costello would agree to this project quicker than you could say “what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding ?”
But would Dion? That, I’m not so sure of. But we could all be surprised.
That day in the summer of 2016, on the phone from a home she rented in Beloeil, she said she was looking out the window at all the different types of trees and was dreaming of how she could get her band and that they’d all sit on “apple boxes and sing acoustic songs, with a little fire and marshmallows, and we could sing till the end of the night, till the fireflies come out.”
So don’t count her out. The story of the emancipation of Céline isn’t over yet.