🔥 A Song Too Big for Ordinary Love
When “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” was released in 1996, it wasn’t just another power ballad — it was a thunderstorm. A seven-minute opera disguised as pop music, overflowing with passion, regret, and resurrection. Written by Jim Steinman — the same genius behind Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” — the song was meant to sound like “the most romantic, dramatic song ever written.”
And it found its perfect voice in Céline Dion.
At that point, Céline was already the queen of 90s balladry. “The Power of Love,” “Because You Loved Me,” “Think Twice” — all anthems that defined a decade of emotional pop. But “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” was different. It wasn’t about gentle gratitude or quiet heartbreak. It was volcanic.
The song spoke of lovers torn apart and reunited by the ghost of memory — of nights too wild to forget, and pain too deep to bury. “There were nights when the wind was so cold…” she begins, whispering over a piano that feels like the sound of distance itself. And then — in one breath — the song erupts.
🎹 The Man Behind the Drama: Jim Steinman
To understand the song, you need to understand its creator. Jim Steinman was never subtle. He once said he didn’t write songs — he wrote “miniature movies about love and death.”
He originally wrote “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” for Meat Loaf, but Steinman felt it needed a female voice — something “too emotional and romantic for a man to sing.” So he gave it first to Pandora’s Box, an all-female project in 1989, where it became a cult favorite.
When Céline Dion’s producer David Foster heard it years later, he knew it was destined for her. “She could take that operatic structure and make it real,” Foster recalled. Céline didn’t just sing Steinman’s words — she believed them. Every pause, every trembling note sounded like it came from someone reliving a love that once consumed her.
💔 The Recording That Became a Resurrection
Recording “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” wasn’t easy. It took nearly three days to get the full vocal track right. Steinman pushed for drama — “It has to sound like you’re being haunted by love!” — while Foster demanded precision.
Céline found the balance between both: her performance was both theatrical and utterly sincere. The way she lingered on “There were moments of gold…” wasn’t just nostalgia — it was ache. When she hit the chorus, she didn’t belt — she soared.
The song’s structure itself mirrors memory. It begins soft and reflective, swells with flashbacks of ecstasy and pain, and then collapses again into a whisper — like someone who’s remembered too much.
When the final line fades, “But it’s all coming back to me now…,” it’s not resolution. It’s surrender.
🎞 The Music Video: Gothic Romance Meets Tragedy
Directed by Nigel Dick, the music video turned the song into a visual novel. Céline plays a woman mourning her lost lover, haunted by his ghost in a candlelit mansion. The lightning flashes, the curtains tremble, and memories of passion crash over her like waves.
It’s melodramatic, yes — but that’s the point. Steinman’s world was always one where love was apocalyptic, where every emotion deserved a cathedral to echo in. And Céline was the only artist who could make that grandeur believable.
The video became iconic, earning heavy rotation on MTV and VH1. It reminded the world that even in the 90s — an era of grunge and irony — there was still room for sincerity and spectacle.
🌹 A Song Too Real for Pretending
“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” topped charts worldwide and earned a place as one of Céline’s most beloved songs. But beyond commercial success, it touched something deeper — especially among listeners who had known love that didn’t fade quietly.
For many, it became the soundtrack of closure — or the impossibility of it. It captured that bittersweet moment when the pain of remembering is still better than the emptiness of forgetting.
Years later, when Céline lost her husband René Angélil — her lifelong partner and guiding force — the song took on a haunting new meaning. In her Vegas residency, when she performed it after his passing, she seemed to sing not to the audience, but to him. “When you touch me like this…” — her voice broke on the line. The applause afterward wasn’t just admiration. It was communion.
💫 Why It Still Hits So Hard
Part of what makes “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” timeless is that it refuses to be small. It embraces the full scale of emotion — the kind we often try to hide today. It’s about love that ruins and redeems, about how memory can be both a curse and a comfort.
In an age of understatement, Céline’s performance reminds us that it’s okay to feel too much. That the grand, messy, operatic kind of love still matters.
And maybe that’s why, nearly 30 years later, when the piano intro begins, we still stop. We still feel something stirring — something we thought we’d forgotten.
Because sometimes, it does all come back.
🎵 Song