Few songs demand as much from a singer as “It’s All Coming Back to Me,” the Celine Dion signature that has taken on a second life across social media, turning up on TikTok feeds and in vocal studios around the world. Singers everywhere want to know how to sing it, and that is entirely understandable.
The song is a masterclass in dynamics, register control, and emotional connection, and Celine’s performance of it is one of the most technically rich recordings in contemporary pop singing. This post breaks down exactly what is happening in her voice, and what you need to work on if you want to take on this song yourself.
The Opening: Dynamics and Vowel Shape
From the very first phrases of “It’s All Coming Back to Me,” Celine Dion establishes something that many singers overlook: volume is not meant to be steady throughout a phrase. As she moves into closed vowels, she pulls back on the volume, then opens into wider vowels and lets the sound grow.
This is not accidental. It is a deliberate shaping of the phrase that serves the lyric and the music at the same time. The minor-key setting of the song creates an immediate sense of foreboding, and the way Celine uses her consonants in those early lines, almost stamping into them, reinforces the emotional weight of the story.
Open vowels produce more sound, and Celine uses that physics intentionally. When she arrives on wider vowel sounds at higher points in the phrase, the volume naturally increases, and she shapes her mouth accordingly. Understanding this relationship between vowel shape and volume is one of the first steps to singing this song well. You do not push for volume; you open for it.
Chest Voice, Mixed Voice, and Thyroid Tilt
In the verses of “It’s All Coming Back to Me,” Celine operates in a quality that sits somewhere between chest voice and mixed voice, with thicker vocal folds and substantial thyroid tilt. Thyroid tilt refers to the tilting forward of the thyroid cartilage (the Adam’s apple) to elongate the vocal folds.
This allows a singer to move up through their range without throwing excessive weight at the higher notes. It is the difference between a sound that feels effortful and strained and one that feels supported and sung.
Here is what thyroid tilt is doing for Celine in this performance:
- It allows her to maintain thicker vocal folds higher in her range without pushing.
- It gives the sound that warm, leaned-in quality rather than a hard, chest-heavy bang.
- It enables the smooth transitions between her dynamic levels.
- It is the foundation of both her softer moments and her belt.
Without thyroid tilt, the same phrases would sound like you are telling someone off rather than singing to them. The emotional warmth that makes Celine’s performance so affecting is inseparable from this technical foundation.
The Role of the Tongue
One of the most distinctive and instructive moments in Celine Dion’s performance is the visible movement of her tongue as she shapes certain vowels. The tongue is not a passive instrument in singing; it actively shapes resonance and helps stabilise the muscles of the throat.
What matters here is understanding the difference between pulling the tip of the tongue back, which can constrict the sound, and moving the back of the tongue to shape vowels, which is what skilled singers do. Celine’s French linguistic background gives her a natural facility with tongue placement that appears in her vowel shaping throughout “It’s All Coming Back to Me.”
For singers working on this song, building tongue strength and awareness is not optional. It becomes especially critical at the higher end of the song’s range, where the placement of the tone needs to remain stable even as vowels change beneath it. This is advanced technique, but it is the kind of work that makes a lifelong difference to your singing, not just your ability to get through this one song.
Belting in “It’s All Coming Back to Me”
The belt moment in “It’s All Coming Back to Me” is one of the most striking in the song, but it is easy to misunderstand what Celine is actually doing. A belt is not a yell. It has a distinct timbre that comes from a specific physiological event: the cricoid cartilage, which sits beneath the thyroid, tilting back. This tilting allows the vocal folds to thicken further, producing that characteristic bright, powerful, slightly edgy sound that we recognise as belting.
To produce a healthy belt, a singer needs:
- Subglottic pressure: the air pressure beneath the vocal folds needs to build and remain stable.
- Engagement of the large muscles of the back and ribcage to hold the ribs out and manage that pressure.
- Thicker vocal folds with a longer closed phase, which produces volume without effortful pushing.
- Enough thyroid tilt to keep the sound from flipping or cracking under the increased fold weight.
What makes Celine’s belt in this song so effective is not just the power of it, but the release out of it. After the peak of the belt, she allows the vocal folds to thin slightly, and vibrato floods into the sound. That transition is a sign of precise control, and it is what separates a trained singer from someone who is just pushing hard and hoping for the best.
Falsetto Flips and Register Flexibility
Not everything in “It’s All Coming Back to Me” is big and held. Celine also uses subtle flips into falsetto on certain phrases, particularly when she arrives at closed vowels on upper notes. These are not mistakes; they are choices. The closed vowel naturally assists the transition into a lighter register, and Celine uses that acoustic property to vary the texture of her performance. There are phrases where the volume drops dramatically as she crosses into a thinner fold quality, and then builds again.
A singer working on this song should not try to eliminate these lighter moments in favour of power throughout. The contrast is the point. Being able to move between registers with intention, making the transitions sound like expressive choices rather than technical failures, is one of the things that defines a genuinely flexible singer.
Posture, Microphone Technique, and the Body
Celine Dion’s use of her body in performance is worth paying attention to, even where she does things that would not be recommended for most singers. When she extends her arms outward during sustained notes, she is activating the muscles of the back to help hold the ribs out and maintain subglottic pressure.
The weight of the arms engaging the back is a legitimate technique for supporting long, loud phrases. However, the forward shoulder position she adopts at certain moments in the performance is something to be conscious of. Bringing the shoulders forward compresses lung capacity and puts extra demand on the larynx.
A simple way to find good shoulder position: raise both arms overhead, let the shoulders drop naturally, and then lower the arms to your sides. That is roughly where you want them. Standing tall, with the ribcage lifted and the shoulders back, gives the breath and the larynx the space they need to do their work.
On microphone technique: Celine has been using a microphone as a professional tool since she was a child, and it shows. She angles the microphone away on open vowels and louder moments to manage the level reaching the audience. If you are a pop singer, working with a microphone is not optional. Get familiar with an industry-standard dynamic microphone and a small speaker, and practice understanding what your voice actually sounds like through amplification.
Emotional Connection: Singing It Like You Mean It
“It’s All Coming Back to Me” is a song about a physical, emotional memory flooding back. To sing it well, you need to treat every lyric as a genuine statement addressed to a specific person who is right in front of you. Celine’s performance works as well as it does because she is fully present in that story. The breath that comes into the softer moments, the thin vocal folds opening slightly at the back to allow a breathy quality through, these are not just technical choices. They are the sound of vulnerability.
One of the things Celine does consistently in this performance is resist going over the emotional threshold into crying. She inhabits the feeling fully, right up to the edge of it, but she stays functional as a singer. That balance, deep emotional commitment without the physical collapse that crying produces, is one of the most demanding aspects of singing this kind of repertoire. It requires practice in private, getting comfortable with overdoing the expression until it stops feeling embarrassing and starts feeling like communication.
At the end of the performance, Celine takes a moment to come back to herself. That is not incidental; it is important. These are large emotions to carry through a song, and professional singers develop the ability to step out of them cleanly. In the beginning, it can feel heavy. Giving yourself that moment of decompression after performing emotionally demanding material is good practice, not weakness.
What You Need to Work On to Sing This Song
“It’s All Coming Back to Me” is not a beginner song, but it is absolutely achievable with the right technical foundation. Before you focus on matching Celine’s performance, work on building these skills in order:
- Vocal fold closure and breath balance: the foundation of every register in this song.
- Thyroid tilt: without it, the song sounds aggressive rather than emotional.
- Tongue strength and stability: essential for maintaining tone placement through vowel changes.
- Subglottic pressure management: the engine behind the belt and the sustained notes.
- Register flexibility: the ability to move between chest-mix and falsetto with intention.
- Microphone technique: non-negotiable for performing this as a pop song.
- Emotional commitment: the technical work only matters if you are actually present in the lyric.
Even a singer of Celine Dion’s calibre has moments in live performance where the voice does something unexpected: a bit of scratch in the tone, a note slightly off centre. What matters is not that these things never happen, but that you have the technique to recognise them and correct in the moment without stopping the performance. That is what training is for.
If you want to learn more about how you can learn to implement these singing techniques into your own voice, let’s sit down for a chat and discuss if the vocal academy is the right fit for you. You can join us here.