My Love: Ultimate Essential Collection (Collector's Edition)

Performer: Celine Dion
Artist: Peabo Bryson; R. Kelly; Andrea Bocelli
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: Twenty years into her career and nearly a decade since her first anthology, 1999's ALL THE WAY: A DECADE OF SONG, MY LOVE: ESSENTIAL COLLECTION is a fine overview of Celine Dion's hits. A well chosen, thoughtfully sequenced, and beautifully packaged compilation, the 17-track MY LOVE: ESSENTIAL COLLECTION includes all of Dion's biggest chart hits (including those which had appeared on her first anthology, such as the epic "My Heart Will Go On"), several other fan favorites, and a new single, "My Love." There is also a two-disc special edition, MY LOVE: ULTIMATE ESSENTIAL COLLECTION, which contains all 17 tracks from the single disc version and adds nine others, including duets with Barbra Streisand and Andrea Bocelli. Following the first Celine Dion collection, All the Way: A Decade of Song, by roughly a decade, My Love: Ultimate Essential Collection doubles almost everything about the initial collection: it covers two decades instead of one, has two discs, not one, and falls just short of having the double the songs. It's almost an overcompensation for how All the Way concentrated on newer recordings at the expense of hits, but then again Celine has had more hits in the ten years since All the Way, so it makes sense that My Love is a bigger, grander collection. The problem is, apart from her cover of Roy Orbison's "I Drove All Night," almost none of her new-millennium hits are as memorable as her singles from the '90s, so this double CD doesn't offer too much of an enticement for fans to replace 1999's single-disc set. But for those listeners who are looking for an overview of Celine Dion's two decades as an international superstar, My Love fits the bill well as it has all her big adult contemporary hits -- "Where Does My Heart Beat Now," "Beauty and the Beast," "If You Asked Me To," "Because You Loved Me," "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," and "My Heart Will Go On" -- all sequenced chronologically. [A single-disc edition entitled My Love: Essential Collection was also released.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine Following the first Celine Dion collection, All the Way: A Decade of Song, by roughly a decade, My Love: Ultimate Essential Collection doubles almost everything about the initial collection: it covers two decades instead of one, has two discs, not one, and falls just short of having the double the songs. It's almost an overcompensation for how All the Way concentrated on newer recordings at the expense of hits, but then again Celine has had more hits in the ten years since All the Way, so it makes sense that My Love is a bigger, grander collection. The problem is, apart from her cover of Roy Orbison's "I Drove All Night," almost none of her new-millennium hits are as memorable as her singles from the '90s, so this double CD doesn't offer too much of an enticement for fans to replace 1999's single-disc set. But for those listeners who are looking for an overview of Celine Dion's two decades as an international superstar, My Love fits the bill well as it has all her big adult contemporary hits -- "Where Does My Heart Beat Now," "Beauty and the Beast," "If You Asked Me To," "Because You Loved Me," "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," and "My Heart Will Go On" -- all sequenced chronologically. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Celine Dion's ascent from stardom in her native Canada to the upper echelons of international pop divadom is one of the 1990s major success stories. Blessed with a formidable set of pipes and a preference for heart-in-the-throat ballads, the precociously talented Dion initially won over American listeners in 1991, 10 years after her French-language debut, with the title track from Disney's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. From then on, Dion became a music-biz phenomenon, with platinum record sales, sold-out concerts, and across-the-board appeal rivaling her idol, Barbra Streisand.

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