Songfacts®:

• Barbra Streisand sang this hit Adult Contemporary ballad as a duet with Celine Dion for their respective 1997 albums Higher Ground and Let's Talk About Love. It was written by the single's producers, hitmakers David Foster and Walter Afanasieff, and Foster's then-wife Linda Thompson (who previously co-wrote the Whitney Houston hit "I Have Nothing" with him).
  
  The song is about a young woman who turns to an older woman for romantic advice, with Dion being afraid to confess her feelings for a man and Streisand encouraging her to "tell him."
• The collaboration was born out of a controversy on the night of the Academy Awards in 1997. After turning down the chance to perform "I Finally Found Someone," her Best Original Song-nominated duet with Bryan Adams from her movie The Mirror Has Two Faces, Streisand changed her mind and wanted to sing it - but Celine Dion had already stepped in. When she skipped out on Dion's performance to use the restroom, the media accused Streisand of purposely snubbing her replacement, which she denied (she had left during a commercial break and the doors were locked when she tried to get back in). She made amends with Dion by sending her a bouquet of flowers and inviting her to do the duet.
• In her 2001 autobiography, My Story, My Dream, Dion recalled the moment when both women heard the final product from opposite coasts:
  
  "Barbra sang her part in Los Angeles, and a few days later in New York, I added my voice to hers. One evening, after the arrangers and technicians had mixed the song, we listened to it together, Barbra at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, and I at the Hit Factory in New York. When it was over, silence fell over the studio. We all were watching the telephone, which took an eternity to ring. David answered it.
  
  'It's for you, Celine.'
  
  It was Barbra calling to say how much she liked my interpretation."
  
  She marveled at how Dion was able to blend her voice so well with the music and with Streisand's own voice.
  
  "I didn't dare tell her I'd sung with her hundreds and hundreds of times before in my bedroom on the Rue Notre-Dame in Charle­magne," Dion continued. "I just said I'd been working hard and I trained like an athlete."
• In the US, this peaked at #5 on the Adult Contemporary chart and #58 on the Radio Songs chart. It was thwarted from entering the Billboard Hot 100 because the singers' labels fought over which would get to release the single to the point where they decided not to release it all in the US, except for a brief period to secure its Grammy consideration. It got a proper single release overseas, where it peaked at #3 in the UK and reached the Top 10 in Australia, France, and Italy, among others.
• Streisand and Dion were supposed to sing this at the 1998 Grammy Awards, where the song was nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, but Streisand had to miss the ceremony because she fell ill with the flu. Streisand's duet with Bryan Adams, "I Finally Found Someone," was also competing for the award, but both songs lost to "Don't Look Back" by John Lee Hooker with Van Morrison.
• Co-writer/co-producer Walter Afanasieff was a frequent collaborator of Mariah Carey throughout the '90s on hits like "Hero," "Dreamlover," and "All I Want For Christmas Is You."
  
  He also scored big with Dion, producing her Peabo Bryson duet "Beauty And The Beast" from the 1991 Disney film of the same name and her Titanic smash, "My Heart Will Go On" (1997).