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LAS VEGAS—If you think you know Celine Dion, then think again.
A recent exclusive interview with her turned out to be a revelation of her views on spirituality. For someone who grew up deep in the Roman Catholic enclave of Quebec, Dion’s credo is surprisingly different.
“It’s important for people to have something they can touch and believe in,” she says passionately. “I say that to believe in yourself is to believe in God. For me, God is life itself, the birds, the air, the sunrise and the sunset, the children. Yes, that is where I find God. Not in a church.”
Dion had just finished another show to a sold-out crowd of 4,000 people in the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. It had seemed unusually electric, even for this always-on performer, and later backstage she admitted it had been.
“Sometimes there are special moments. This was one. You don’t know when they’re going to appear. I guess that’s what makes them special. Sometimes you just recreate the emotions. Sometimes you get caught by them. And some nights, like tonight, they possess you.”
Dion is on a roll these days, with her latest Sony album, ,Loved Me Back to Life, having sold 1.3 million copies worldwide so far and her appearances at Caesars continuing to fill the house.
And so she’s added some unexpected pieces to her repertoire, including nakedly emotional renditions of songs like Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” and Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas.”
“I never thought I was going to sing those songs in Vegas. Everyone told me not to do it. People are coming here to have a good time, to gamble, to eat at great restaurants, to go shopping, to hear me sing their favourite songs. ‘Oh good, she did “Titanic,” now goodnight.’ That’s why they come. Not to watch me tear my heart out and offer it to them.
“But I figured at this point in my life, in my career, do I have anything to lose? I truly believe I don’t. If it’s the end of this, then it’s the beginning of something else. As long as you believe there are other things, you never die.”
She smiles as she remembers her time in Las Vegas. “With the previous show, don’t get me wrong, I had a great time, I was supposed to be here two weeks, I was here five years. But it was a theatrical vision.
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“For this show, I wanted to give myself an opportunity to sit down close, to sing to people, to talk to people, to share things, to touch people. . . . This is me, that is what I am all about. To sit close and open my heart. . . . I don’t want to offer the people who come hear me a bouquet where every song is a rose. I want to take them into a garden with many different flowers.”
Dion dives deeply into the adolescent pain of Ian’s “At Seventeen,” singing the line about “ugly duckling girls like me” with great poignancy, made ever more potent by a video display of just how awkward she was at the beginning of her career.
But she believes the number is more than a personal confessional. “There is that hopeless moment with all teenagers, men and women, it’s part of growth. It’s an opportunity for growth.
“Things happen, they get in the way. Feelings of ugliness, of being unloved. But they should get in your way at a young age so you can outgrow them, so you can learn to get around them, to live your life, to find yourself. To find who you really are inside, even if sometimes, it breaks your heart.”
The last five years have been a whirlwind for Dion. After closing her first Vegas show, she toured the world, nearly lost her voice, experienced some painful losses in trying to conceive another child and then joyously gave birth to twins.
“You got though so many things in life,” she sighs, recalling those experiences. “You lose people, you give birth to children, you see so many million things. You make choices. You learn to say no. You purify yourself, you look for spirituality, for emotional balance.
“I love the way our lives keep changing. There’s one great thing about knowledge in life, about experience, about maturity, about time, about getting older and that’s knowing what you stand for, what you believe in. It would be so very sad if we just grew older to die. There must be something good about this. There must be a good reason why we mature and we move on.”
Dion’s views seem so unfettered by dogma that it comes as a surprise when, at the end of one song during her act, she makes the sign of the cross. Does this mean she is still a devout Catholic?
“I was raised Catholic,” she says quickly and then comes a long pause. “Look, I don’t want to cause any trouble with any religions, but you have to understand that my mom is my hero and she had a tough time with the priests in the old days.
“Back then they were leading the villages, they were the chiefs. They would come knocking on everyone’s doors. ‘How many children? When is the next one?’ as if that was their right to know.
“My mother finally had 14 children. But after the eighth one, the priest kept knocking on the door and asking her when the next one was coming, because it had been two whole years!”
Dion smiles. “But on that particular day, she found strength and she told the priest, ‘I am going to have children when I decide to have children.’ The priest said, ‘Then I banish you from the house of God.’ She replied, ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m the God in here with my children. This is the house that I believe in.’
“That is the way we were raised. That is the strength and belief we had. I didn’t have to go to church and get on my knees to find something to hold onto.”
The superstar diva known for her outsized moments onstage suddenly grows very quiet.
“If you can find energy in a rock that your children gave you, that can become the most precious thing in your life. I have boxes of dead leaves, branches, flowers that they brought to me. That’s my God. That’s my religion.
“If you don’t believe in something, then you’re a little bit dead.”
FIVE FAVE MUSICAL INFLUENCES
STEVIE WONDER
“I do a hologram duet with him in the show and every night I look forward to that moment. I’m sharing a stage with someone I respect so much.”
JACQUES BREL
“His music has so much feeling, so much pain that you can only begin to explore it.”
JANIS IAN
“When I sing it (‘At Seventeen’) now, I like to think I’m saying to people, ‘Look who you are and look where you are, you’ve outgrown those feelings about what you didn’t like about yourself.’”
NE-YO
“My son, René-Charles, introduced me to his music and it opened a whole new world to me.”
MICHAEL JACKSON
“I am so happy there is a Cirque show here in Vegas celebrating his life and art. He was the greatest.”
http://www.thestar.c...eline_dion.html
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