The French duo takes on “Bonjour, Pardon, Merci”, released last July. The remix comes out this Friday, the very day the Québécois singer performs at the Plenitude Arena.
They grew up with her songs. The ones parents played at home, in the car, on tapes and then CDs, the ones you know by heart before you even know why. So to announce their remix, Arnaud Bonet and Pierre Della Monica invented the memory they wish they had: a video of themselves as kids at the Stade de France on 19 June 1999, with their parents behind the camera. The footage never existed. The concert did: that night, Céline Dion became the first artist to fill the stadium, 90,000 people, before doing it again the next day.
The track itself is very much of today. “Bonjour, Pardon, Merci”, released on 3 July, continued the singer’s return to recording after “Dansons”. The lyrics are by Ycare, who wrote it with Renaud Rebillaud, who also produced it. The songwriter drew on Ho’oponopono, a Hawaiian prayer that involves saying “forgive me, thank you and I love you” every morning. Bon Entendeur turns it into two minutes and fifty-one seconds, released on Sony Music Canada.
The timing does the rest. This Friday, 25 September, Céline Dion is on stage at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre for one of the sixteen dates of the residency she began on 12 September. The duo, who in May delivered the remix of Dalida’s “Mourir sur scène”, a number one in France, never expected to get this far. Dressing a ballad built for soaring high notes in this electronic touch, at the very moment her voice is reunited with an audience after years away: it is a move with real feeling.
