stated that Warren's trusty melody is wholly natural and free-flowing, while production from the usually rock-oriented Matt Serletic is "sheer perfection". It all peaks from the glorious midsection through to the end, where Dion delivers exactly what we've come to expect: a crescendo as "spine-tingling" as those first few times we heard "My Heart Will Go On". Although Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave the album four out of five stars, he criticized it for including seven new songs and just nine hits. According to him, if it had been a straight hits collection, with "That's the Way It Is" and "If Walls Could Talk" added to the end, it would have been fine, but padding it with nearly a full album worth of new material hurts it. He also noticed that Dion's first American hit, "Where Does My Heart Beat Now", isn't here, nor is her duet with Barbra Streisand, "Tell Him". Erlewine stated that the best of the hits, like the Meat Loaf-ian epic "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" and "My Heart Will Go On", are certainly among the best adult contemporary songs of the decade. In comparison to the new material, he felt that the danceable "That's the Way It Is" and the "pretty" ballad "If Walls Could Talk" work, but he did not like "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "All the Way". According to him, the remaining three new songs "aren't bad", but they're not particularly memorable, especially compared to the hits. Commercial performance All the Way... A Decade of Song debuted at number three on the US Billboard 200 with sales of 303,000 copies, the second-largest opener in Dion's career at that time, exceeded only by the 334,000 units that 1997's Let's Talk About Love spun in its first week. Thanks to Dion's CBS television special, she earned a second-week gain of 30% (394,000 copies) and the third number-one album of her career. The next week, All the Way... A Decade of Song stayed at number one, selling another 328,000 units. In the following week, it fell to number two with sales of 415,000 copies. In the fifth week, it topped the chart again, selling 537,000 units, becoming the first number one album of the 2000s. All the Way... A Decade of Song draw the biggest weekly sales in its sixth week when it sold 640,000 copies, falling to