Songoftheday 3/16/20 - For all those times you stood by me, for all the truth that you made me see....
from the album Falling Into You (1996)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (six weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 30
Today's song of the day comes from Canadian singer Celine Dion, who had landed her first top ten album in America in 1993 with her third English-language effort The Colour Of My Love. That record had spun off three top-40 pop hits here in the States with "Misled", "When I Fall In Love" with Clive Griffin, and her #1 hit cover of "The Power Of Love". In 1995, she would return with a track she contributed to the Carole King tribute album Tapestry: Revisited - the result, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", wasn't released as a single, but got enough radio airplay on easy listening stations to climb to #31 on the Adult Contemporary radio chart in Billboard magazine. At the beginning of the next year, Dion released the lead single to her upcoming fourth English album Falling Into You. "Because You Loved Me", a by-the-books ballad written by song doctor Diane Warren, was used as the theme for the movie Up Close & Personal. The film, starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer, was a totally whitewashed bio-pic of the news anchor Jessica Savitch, devoid of the major drama and tragic end that made her story so compelling. Anyhoo, audiences (most female audiences) ate up the romance flick, as well as radio took to "Because You Loved Me", which didn't appear on the movie soundtrack, which even goosed the sales of Falling For You even more...
"Because You Loved Me" became Celine's second #1 pop hit in the U.S. in March of 1996. The single was a massive "easy listening" hit, spending a then record-breaking 19 weeks at #1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, while ruling the Adult Top-40 list for a dozen weeks as well. The song even crossed over to urban stations, landing Dion her first hit on the R&B chart, just missing the top-40 at #41. Internationally, the single topped the Australian singles chart for three weeks, and reached the top ten in her native Canada (#2), Ireland (#2), New Zealand (#3), Switzerland (#3), the Netherlands (#4), Iceland (#4), the UK (#5), and Belgium (#5F/#12W). It also rose to #13 in Germany and #19 in France. At the Grammy Awards in 1997, "Because You Loved Me" won for Best Song from a Movie or TV, while being nominated for both Record of the Year and Song Of The Year (with both going to Eric Clapton's "Change The World"), as well as for Best Female Pop Performance (which Toni Braxton took for "Un-Break My Heart"). Meanwhile, at the Academy Awards as well as the Golden Globes, she was up for Best Song, which Madonna won both for Evita's "You Must Love Me".
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Here's Celine performing for the Academy Awards in 1996...
and again at the Daytime Emmys to honor Oprah Winfrey...
And live from Memphis in 1998...
and finally, on her A New Day tour....
Up tomorrow: Pop-Punkers are in a bit of mental soup.
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