It's All Coming Back to Me Now

Jim Steinman's maximalism meets Céline Dion's stamina in a seven-minute Wagnerian melodrama that treats a love song as a haunting. The production is deliberately excessive — thunderclaps, a churchy organ, motorcycle-adjacent guitar squall, timpani, and a rhythm section that keeps swelling and receding like weather — and the arrangement withholds the full chorus until well past the two-minute mark, building anticipation the way a Meat Loaf record would, because it was written for that world first. Dion navigates it by starting almost whispered, breathy and close-miked, then unfolding across multiple key changes into her full-throated, French-Canadian-accented belt, which never sounds strained no matter how high Steinman pushes it. The lyric is memory as possession: a dead or departed lover returning through sensory triggers, touch and lightning and the smell of rain, the past overwhelming the present against the singer's will. It's genuinely gothic, closer to Wuthering Heights than to adult contemporary radio, which is where it nonetheless lived for years off Falling Into You. The video's candlelit mansion and phantom-lover imagery understood the assignment entirely. This is a song for driving through a storm alone, or for anyone who has ever been ambushed by an old feeling in a doorway.