Courage

Upon erupting into a house single fit for any Vegas club, Courage’s opener, “Flying on My Own,” finds Céline Dion alone. “The warmer winds will carry me,” she sings at high altitude, her voice climbing. “Anywhere I want them to/If you could see what I can see/That nothing’s blocking my view.” Courage is the Canadian star’s first album (in any language) since the 2016 death of her husband and longtime manager, René Angélil. Recorded almost entirely in Las Vegas—near the end of the wildly successful eight-year residency there that she and Angélil had conceived of together—these are songs of resilience, of moving forward when all you want is to look back. To get there, she collaborated with some of modern pop’s biggest names (Sia, Sam Smith, Skylar Grey, Greg Kurstin, David Guetta) for everything from heartbreaking ballads (“Courage”) to brief flirtations with rapping (the piano-driven lullaby “Perfect Goodbye,” which features contributions from Steve Aoki). “I’m having some kind of breakthrough,” she sings on “Lying Down,” a tale of faltering love. “I’m ready to live.”

The lightning rod for Alabaster DePlume’s luminous follow up to the widely-acclaimed 2020 release To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 was personal. “Someone was going through a thing,” says the Mancunian poet-performer. “I said, ‘go forward in the courage of your love’. And then I thought 'yeah, that's what I need to hear as well’.”

Her first English-language effort following a pair of mid-decade personal tragedies, Celine Dion's 12th set Courage is a transformative, cathartic release for the powerhouse vocalist that carries listeners through her process of healing and moving on. While the deaths of her husband and brother inform much of the album, they do not completely define it. Rather, Dion's phoenix-from-the-ashes power shines and reveals a confident rebirth as she rebuilds life and reclaims herself. Paired with its intentionally uplifting French-language predecessor, 2016's Encore un Soir, Courage continues to track Dion's grief, just with a contemporary pop angle.