{"id":8208,"date":"2015-06-23T11:12:20","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T11:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=8208"},"modified":"2015-07-09T12:51:07","modified_gmt":"2015-07-09T12:51:07","slug":"how-james-horner-came-to-write-the-titanic-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=8208","title":{"rendered":"How James Horner came to write the \u2018Titanic\u2019 song"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"titanic<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 American composer James Horner, who has died in a plane crash aged 61, won an Academy Award along with lyricist Will Jennings for \u201cMy Heart Will Go On\u201d sung by Celine Dion in \u201cTitanic\u201d, and it sold millions, but the song was a complete afterthought.<\/p>\n

James Cameron\u2019s movie has grossed almost $2.2 billion worldwide and won 11 Oscars including best picture and best score for Horner. The soundtrack album has reported sales of around 28 million and the single was No. 1 around the world.<\/p>\n

It almost didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

When I spoke to Horner (pictured below) in January 1998, he told me he\u2019d had no plan to write a song for the picture: \u201cI figured at the end of the movie I\u2019d do what I always do, an end credit, and I was going to make it somewhat of a lullaby. I wanted it to be something elegiac like the closing scenes of \u201cBraveheart\u201d. I wanted it to have that kind of very wistful timeless quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"James<\/a>He started to think the best way to do that was with a song: \u201cIt was more of a compositional decision than a commercial one. I never really thought of the commercial side of it. I only thought about what was the best way to close this particular movie. A song, I felt, was the best solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Horner told no one, not even Cameron, since he knew, he said, that if word got out that there was a crack in the door for a song in \u201cTitanic\u201d then every songwriter would submit a song on spec: \u201cI kept it to myself. I didn\u2019t discuss it with Jim. I wrote it. I played it for a friend. I played it for my daughter. But I didn\u2019t tell anybody else about it. I took it to somebody I\u2019ve worked with very closely before, Will Jennings, who\u2019s a lyricist, and he loved it. I asked him to write words to it. I didn\u2019t know at that stage what would happen. It was still a very closely held secret. He wrote what turned out to be the song in the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his score to the film, Horner had used the ethereal voice of Norwegian star Sissel as an instrument to mix in with his synthesised sounds. But he had known Celine Dion for years and he knew that not only was she commercially viable, she also recorded for Sony, the label that would release the soundtrack.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought that was a very good political situation,\u201d Horner told me, \u201cbut the first and primary reason I went to her is because of her voice. It\u2019s a very peculiar thing I have about vocals and voices. I look for just the right thing. Celine strikes me as being a wonderful opera singer in a way. The fact that she does pop music is really secondary to what her voice can really do. Because the song has such a very large range, I felt she technically was the only person who could sing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dion and her husband and manager Rene loved the song, Horner said, and even though she was headlining at Caesar\u2019s Palace in Las Vegas, she said she wanted to do the demo so he arranged to do it in New York privately so no one would know.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought it was just going to be Celine and me and Rene and one or two others, but a fleet of her people came in and a fleet of Sony people. By now, it\u2019s very hard to contain the thing but I\u2019ve asked them all to just keep it quiet. Don\u2019t mention it to Paramount, don\u2019t mention it to Fox, don\u2019t say anything. Because even with all of this, with all this power behind it, in Celine, it could be that Jim Cameron could still say, \u2018No way, I\u2019m not having a goddamned contemporary pop song in my movie!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Horner let things rest for about three weeks even while he met with Cameron every couple of days on the score: \u201cThen I decided he\u2019d been in a particularly good state of mind for about a week. He\u2019d liked what I\u2019d been doing for a while. I\u2019d had a good long streak of positive vibes.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of one of their sessions, he asked the director if he could play something for him: \u201cWe went into his study and I played him the song. He said, \u2018What is this? Is that Celine singing? What is this?\u2019 I said, \u2018Yes, what do you think of putting this in the movie?’ There was complete silence. He played it two or three more times and he said, \u2018This is great!\u2019 And it was sold.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 American composer James Horner, who has died in a plane crash aged 61, won an Academy Award along with lyricist Will Jennings for \u201cMy Heart Will Go On\u201d sung by Celine Dion in \u201cTitanic\u201d, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,8,2257],"tags":[4150,4152,670,3519,4153,4154,4151],"class_list":["post-8208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-music","category-recalling","tag-titanic","tag-celine-dion","tag-james-cameron","tag-james-horner","tag-sissel","tag-sony-records","tag-will-jennings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8208"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8229,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8208\/revisions\/8229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}