31 January 1997
Was Bryan Adams now the ’90s go-to person for a sure-fire movie theme hit? La Streisand hadn’t been in the charts for a while, so she and her people probably figured they needed a contemporary act to see their soundtrack single over the line. Bryan Adams previously had movie tie-in synergy number ones, and now he had facial hair because grunge, so he was as contemporary as Hollywood gets. I haven’t seen The Mirror Has Two Faces but I gather it has some sort of ugly duckling plot point where Babs’ character, Hollywood-plain in wearing a sweater and smelling like soup but still more radiant than us mere mortals, instead glams up and takes her glasses off, to which her leading men go “But-but-but… you’re BEAUTIFUL!” Between this and Girl Power, the top of the ’96-’97 singles chart wasn’t the place to go looking for feminism.
‘I Finally Found Someone’ also has Streisand slumming it with the proles: “It started over coffee”, she coos prosaically, when we all know that her typical romantic ballads start with heart-rending melodrama and then work upwards. Still, Barbra is the best thing about this record, which is faint praise when the other things include Bryan Adams. He croaks hoarsely through various slushy cliches, as was his ’90s wont. Streisand’s voice audibly sparkles, though, sprinkling even the flaccid pre-chorus of “My favourite line / was ‘Can I call you sometime?'” with movie-star glitter. A full makeover, of course, would have involved ditching smelly, unfashionable Bryan Adams, the ’80s ugly duckling who became a ’90s ugly duck. Anyway, the bigger star here makes this a tolerable bit of old gloop. That said, the official video (below) on Babs’ channel cuts out the whole middle section to make the song shorter, for which I’m genuinely relieved.
