Songfacts®:

• "My Heart Will Go On" was written for the 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic. James Horner came up with the music for the song and scored the film. Horner, who died in a 2015 plane crash at age 61, was a very popular composer of orchestral music who wrote scores for many movies, including Braveheart, Apollo 13 and Aliens.
• Will Jennings wrote the lyrics. Jennings is a prolific lyricist who worked with Steve Winwood on many of his hits and also wrote songs for Rodney Crowell, Barry Manilow, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Roy Orbison and many others. In a Songfacts interview with Jennings, he told us the inspiration behind the lyrics to this song: "James Horner, who I had worked with on other films, asked me to come to his house and consider writing something for Titanic. James told me the story of the script and then played me the theme he had written for the film. The character Rose, looking back over the all those years, caught my imagination and I connected her with a 100-plus-year-old woman, still working, still vital, Beatrice Wood, who I had met a few years before in Ojai, California, an hour or so north of where I lived in Westlake Village. Wood had been an artist in New York before World War I and had lived and worked in France, and wound up in California and finally in Ojai, working as a fine arts potter.
  
  My wife and I happened to be in Ojai when the premiere of a film called Mama of Dada, a documentary about Wood's life, was shown and we went to see it and Ms. Wood herself showed up, very much alive and lively, 101-plus, and talked about the film before it was shown and then received all of the people at the premiere at a hotel across the street from the theatre where the film was shown. When she shook my hand I had such a feeling of vitality and life force - it was like nothing in my life before or since.
  
  When James told me the script, I focused on Rose and thought of Beatrice Wood, who was old enough to have been Rose, and I still had the feeling I had of the life force I felt when I touched Beatrice Wood's hand, and it was from this feeling that I wrote the lyric for 'My Heart Will Go On.' When James and I were working on the film, the rumor was that Jim Cameron had gone crazy in Mexico spending too much money and the film would be a big flop. The rumor was wrong. The film was a huge hit. The song was a huge hit. I am still getting over it. Totally unexpected."
• When Jennings writes song for movies, he often looks at a script or sees a rough cut of the film. This wasn't the case with this song, as he drew inspiration from Horner's narrative. Says Jennngs, "I wrote everything from the point of view of a person of a great age looking back so many years. It was the love story that made the film, of course. It was magnificently done with special effects, the actors were good. But the love story was what it was."
• According to Jennings, Celine Dion was the first choice to sing this. He and Horner worked together on the 1991 movie Feival Goes West and wrote the song "Dreams To Dream" for the film. Dion demoed the song, but it went to Linda Ronstadt, who was a bigger star. By the time Horner and Jennings wrote "My Heart Will Go On," Dion was a huge star, with two #1 hits in America: "The Power Of Love" and "Because You Loved Me." When Horner played it for her, she agreed to sing it... reluctantly.
  
  Her husband/manager Rene Angélil suggested she record a demo, which gave Horner the in. "I wanted to choke my husband," Dion told Billboard. "Because I didn't want to do it!"
  
  When she recorded the demo, Horner told her about the movie and the significance of the song, but Dion just wanted to get it over with ("My girly days are starting to happen"). She nailed the demo in one take, which ended up being the version used in the film.
• The song first appeared on the Titanic soundtrack, released November 7, 1997, which sold at least 15 million copies worldwide even though the rest of the album is comprised of James Horner's instrumental pieces written for the film. This was a huge boon for Sony Records, which released the soundtrack; when they made the deal, they paid just $800,000 for the rights, as it was long before the song was written.
  
  A week after the soundtrack was released, the song appeared on Dion's solo album Let's Talk About Love, which went to #1 in most territories and sold somewhere around 30 million copies worldwide. The RIAA certified both the soundtrack and Dion's album as Diamond for sales of over 10 million in the United States.
• The song's unexpected and enduring success echoes that of the film, which went way over budget and was delayed for months. The gaudy production seemed doomed to the same fate as the title vessel, but it was a triumph, taking in a record $1.8 billion worldwide at the box office in its initial run and winning 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Song for "My Heart Will Go On."
• The version used in the film is far more spartan than the one used on the albums and released as a single. Walter Afanasieff was brought in to produce the track and do the arrangements, turning the song into the majestic orchestral piece that became so successful.
• The film was released on December 19, 1997, by which time the soundtrack had been out for six weeks and Celine Dion's album for five. The film was huge, the #1 movie in America from its debut until April 1998. The song was released as a single on December 8 and picked up steam in January. Once Christmas was over the film was established as a phenomenon - it reached #1 in America the last week of February.
• For the music video, director Billie Woodruff shot footage of Dion in a Los Angeles studio that was intercut with footage from the film.
• Worldwide, this was the biggest selling single of 1998. In the UK it sold 1,312,551 copies, making Celine Dion the only woman with two million-selling singles in Britain (the other was 1994's "Think Twice").
• "My Heart Will Go On" was named the best film song of all time in a 2010 survey decided by listeners of the UK radio station Magic. Runner-up in the poll was Take That's "Rule The World" and in third place came Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing."
• This won the 1998 Grammy Awards for Record Of The Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, Song Of The Year and Best Song for a Motion Picture.
• In 2017, Celine Dion returned to the Grammy stage to present the award for Song of the Year, which she did in tribute to her husband, René Angélil, who died the previous year. "I will never forget sitting with my husband, René, when 'My Heart Will Go On' won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year 18 years ago," she said. The winner: "Hello" by Adele.
• While this song was dominating the charts in 1998, South Park did a send-up called "Throbbing Star," where a female character sings the tune with the lyrics, "There you are, like a throbbing star. I want you to make love to me."
• The version used on the soundtrack runs 5:11; the radio edit goes 4:36.
• Dion performed this song at the Billboard Music Awards in 2017 in honor of its 20th anniversary.
• In 2009, a musician/comedian named Matt Mulholland posted a purposefully bad recorder version of "My Heart Will Go On" to YouTube. Years later, snippets of his cover showed up in many memes. He video ended up getting over 35 million views.