besides celine - a French voice I could not identify for decades but haunted me

[Your_Su_Phu]

I discovered celine as a child when a family friend made a cassette tape for our car with celine on one side, and a handful of French female singers on the other.  the other French singers were unnamed, but I recalled that one of them had an extremely high, bright voice, with a quick vibrato, and she sang this power ballad that seemed to ring higher and higher until the climax of the song.  

The problem was I had no idea where to start to find her, and I didn't speak a lick of French.  I spent YEARS, YEARS trying to figure out who it was long after the cassette was lost.  Even as I devoured Celine's entire French discography and listened to French pop artists from various eras.  

Guess what song randomly popped up on my YouTube today and stopped me dead in my tracks.  It literally ended a mystery I've been trying to solve for TWENTY f****** YEARS.

 

The crazy part is, her name had come up over the years. I know she's a French legend and I even remember a clip of young Celine impersonating her voice on a Quebec TV show.  But I couldn't make the connection at all because I couldn't verbalize the French lyrics of the song, which just came out as garbled phonetic memorizations from my childhood.   Now that I know, it seems so obvious, no one else has that insane speedy Gonzalez vibrato