Songfacts®:

• "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" was written by Jim Steinman, who also wrote many hit songs for Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler. Steinman has said that the lyrics to the song were inspired by the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
  
  Steinman wrote the song for a version of his play Neverland, which is based on the Peter Pan story. In Steinman's play, the song is sung by a middle-aged Wendy when Peter Pan returns to her after 20 years.
• Celine Dion's version is most famous, but Pandora's Box, an all-girl group assembled by Jim Steinman, originally recorded this song in 1989. Despite a lavish Ken Russell video, the single limped to #51 in the UK and was never released in America. Steinman, who died in 2021 at 73, claimed that he put about $1 million into the Pandora's Box project, explaining that he did so out of priorities. "I care as deeply about this music as other people care about their children," he said.
  
  He certainly recouped some of that cash when Celine Dion included it on her 1996 album Falling Into You and released it as a single, the follow-up to her chart-topper "Because You Loved Me." The album sold a staggering 12 million copies in America; the following year Dion had another huge hit with "My Heart Will Go On" from the movie Titanic.
• In 2006 Meat Loaf released his version of the song as a duet with the Norwegian singer Marion Raven, which he thought would capture the feelings between the man and his dead lover. Meat Loaf claimed, however, that he recorded the song to mend his friendship with Steinman, which had turned sour in recent years. It appeared on Meat Loaf's album Bat Out Of Hell 3: The Monster Is Loose.
• After Jim Steinman wrote the song, Meat Loaf hoped to bag it for himself. "That was my song," Meat Loaf laughingly told Billboard magazine in 2006. "I wanted to record it, and Jim said, 'Let's wait,' and so I took him at his word. The next thing you know, Celine Dion is recording it."
• Steinman called the track "an erotic motorcycle." He explained on his website: "It's like Heathcliff digging up Cathy's corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight. You can't get more extreme, operatic or passionate than that."
  
  He's referring to a mythical scene in the book that doesn't actually occur. Heathcliff does have her exhumed but doesn't disturb the corpse.
  
  Heathcliff and Cathy are characters from Wuthering Heights. Steinman wasn't the first to write a song based on the novel; Kate Bush released her song "Wuthering Heights," a #1 hit in the UK, in 1978.
• This power ballad is about the dangerous allure of a toxic romance, not the happy reunion of two ex-lovers. Jim Steinman explained: "I was trying to write a song about dead things coming to life. I was trying to write a song about being enslaved and obsessed by love, not just enchanted and happy with it. It was about the dark side of love and about the extraordinary ability to be resurrected by it once dead. It's about obsession, and that can be scary because you're not in control and you don't know where it's going to stop. It says that, at any point in somebody's life, when they loved somebody strongly enough and that person returns, a certain touch, a certain physical gesture can turn them from being defiant and disgusted with this person to being subservient again. And it's not just a pleasurable feeling that comes back, it's the complete terror and loss of control that comes back. And I think that's ultimately a great weapon."
• This was used in the 2018 movies Like Father and The Breaker Upperer. It was also featured in the TV shows Glee ("Nationals" - 2012) and The Nanny ("Fran's Gotta Have It" - 1997).
• The song stayed at #2 for five weeks in America, at first unable to pass "Macarena," then "No Diggity."
• The music video is a romantic fantasy directed by Nigel Dick and shot at Ploskovice Castle in Prague. It suitable grandiose, opening with her lover dying in a motorcycle crash on a stormy night. His ghost then visits Celine and even rides his motorcycle around the castle, which looks like a lot of fun because he can go through walls.
  
  Two versions of the video were released, one that runs 6:05 and another extended to 7:39.
• Like many songs written by Jim Steinman, this one is a lot longer than your typical pop song, with the album version clocking in at 7:37 and the single cut to 5:28. Here some run times for other Steinman-written hits:
  
  "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" by Bonnie Tyler: 6:57 (album), 5:31 (single)
  "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf: 8:28 (album), 7:57 (single)
  "Left In The Dark" by Barbra Streisand: 7:13 (album), 6:12 (single)
  "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" by Meat Loaf: 12:01 (album), 5:13 (single)
• "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" is a live favorite for Celine Dion, almost always in her setlists, at least in medley form. She used it to open her 2019-2020 Courage World Tour, her last before announcing her diagnosis of Stiff Person Syndrome in 2022.