By the mid-90s, Barbra Streisand was in danger of being talked about in the past tense. Her pedigree was never in question, but hits had dried up, and for an artist who had built her entire career on defying expectation, this mattered. 1996 saw her take a gamble: stepping behind the camera to direct The Mirror Has Two Faces. She wasn’t content with just directing or starring, she wanted the music to be hers, too.
Streisand sketched out the bones of a love theme with Marvin Hamlisch, but her producer David Foster had a thought: this wasn’t just a song, it was a duet. Enter Bryan Adams, then at the height of his chart-owning power, armed with Robert “Mutt” Lange and a back catalogue of juggernauts that dominated radio in the early ’90s.
The result was I Finally Found Someone, and whatever cynicism surrounded it evaporated as soon as they sang it. The chemistry was undeniable. Mirroring the film’s plot, the track was equal parts theatrical and heartfelt, a meeting of Streisand’s sweeping grandeur with Adams’ gravel-toned sincerity.
“I wrote the love theme, the main love theme, then Marvin wrote a bridge to it,” Streisand recalled. “Then David Foster had the idea that I should sing the duet with Bryan Adams. Bryan played our track and heard me humming and fell in love with this little theme that I wrote… and they wrote the lyrics.”
It worked. The song cracked the US charts, earned an Oscar nomination, and gave Streisand her first real hit in over a decade. The film itself? Panned. But critics agreed the song saved it from irrelevance.
The duet even generated mild awards-season drama, with Streisand declining to perform it at the Oscars only for Celine Dion to swoop in. Streisand’s absence from the auditorium during Dion’s rendition was gleefully seized upon by the press, though she’s dismissed it since.
The song lost to Madonna’s You Must Love Me from Evita, but by then it barely mattered. Streisand had re-established herself, Adams had another giant ballad to add to his armoury, and both could say they’d created a power ballad that still resonates decades later.
