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Album Review
Believe Review by Cher Fan Club
Believe, released on October 22, 1998, is Cher's 22nd studio album. It marked a significant shift in her musical style, embracing Euro disco and dance-pop. The album is notable for its use of Auto-Tune, particularly in the title track, which became a worldwide hit and led to the effect being known as "the Cher effect." Believe reached commercial success, topping charts globally and earning critical acclaim for its innovative sound and Cher's vocal performance.
Tracklist
Pick | # | Song | Writer(s) | Producer(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
❤️ | 1 | “Believe” | Cher, Brian Higgins, Stuart McLennen, Paul Barry, Steven Torch, Matthew Gray, Timothy Powell | Mark Taylor, Brian Rawling |
2 | “The Power” | Tommy Simms, Judson Spence | Junior Vasquez | |
❤️ | 3 | “Runaway” | Mark Taylor, Paul Barry | Mark Taylor, Brian Rawling |
❤️ | 4 | “All or Nothing” | Mark Taylor, Paul Barry | Mark Taylor, Brian Rawling |
❤️ | 5 | “Strong Enough” | Mark Taylor, Paul Barry | Mark Taylor, Brian Rawling |
❤️ | 6 | “Dov’è L’amore” | Mark Taylor, Paul Barry | Mark Taylor, Brian Rawling |
7 | “Takin’ Back My Heart” | Diane Warren | Mark Taylor, Brian Rawling | |
❤️ | 8 | “Taxi Taxi” | Todd Terry, Mark Jordan | Todd Terry |
9 | “Love is the Groove” | Betsy Cook, Bruce Woolley | Todd Terry | |
10 | “We All Sleep Alone”* | Desmond Child, Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora | Todd Terry |
*Todd Terry Mix
Singles
"Believe" (1998)
🥇 EUR: #1 (14w)
🥇 FIN: #1 (9w)
🥇 SPA: #1 (9w)
🥇 ITA: #1 (7w)
🥇 SCO: #1 (7w)
🥇 UK: #1 (7w)
🥇 IRE: #1 (6w)
🥇 NOR: #1 (6w)
🥇 AUS: #1 (5w)
🥇 CAN Quebec: #1 (5w)
🥇 SWE: #1 (5w)
🥇 DNK: #1 (4w)
🥇 GER: #1 (4w)
🥇 SWI: #1 (4w)
🥇 US: #1 (4w)
🥇 BEL Wallonia: #1 (3w)
🥇 CAN: #1 (3w)
🥇 NLD: #1 (2w)
🥇 BEL Flanders: #1 (1w)
🥇 FRA: #1 (1w)
🥇 NZ: #1 (1w)
🥇 US Dance Sales: #1 (21w)
🥇 ITA Sales: #1 (13w)
🥇 DNK Sales: #1 (10w)
🥇 FIN Airplay: #1 (9w)
🥇 SCA Airplay: #1 (9w)
🥇 NLD Airplay: #1 (7w)
🥇 BEL Sales: #1 (6w)
🥇 HUN Airplay: #1 (6w)
🥇 UK Airplay: #1 (6w)
🥇 CAN Dance: #1 (5w)
🥇 EUR Airplay: #1 (5w)
🥇 GSA Airplay: #1 (5w)
🥇 LAT Airplay: #1 (5w)
🥇 US Dance Club Play: #1 (5w)
🥇 US Top 40 Tracks: #1 (5w)
🥇 CAN AC: #1 (4w)
🥇 EUR Radio Adds: #1 (4w)
🥇 US Sales: #1 (4w)
🥇 UK (MTV): #1 (3w)
🥇 HUN Sales: #1 (2w)
🥇 FRA Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥇 GRC Sales: #1 (1w)
🥇 CRI Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥈 AUT: #2
🥈 CAN Sales: #2
🥈 MEX: #2
🥈 US Airplay: #2
🥉 POL Airplay: #3
🥉 SLV Airplay: #3
🥉 US AC: #3
🌟 PRI Airplay: #4
🌟 US Dance Digital Sales (2021): #4
🌟 ISL: #5
🌟 ITA Airplay: #5
🌟 FIN Sales: #6
🚀 US Rhythmic Airplay: #17
🚀 CAN Digital Sales (2023): #19
🚀 ISR International Airplay (2025): #19
💎 FRA (SNEP): Diamond
💿💿💿💿💿 UK (BPI): 5× Platinum
💿💿💿 AUS (ARIA): 3× Platinum
💿💿💿 BEL (BRMA): 3× Platinum
💿💿📀 GER (BVMI): 5× Gold *
💿💿💿 SWE (IFPI): 3× Platinum
💿💿 NOR (IFPI): 2× Platinum
💿💿 NZ (RMNZ): 2× Platinum
💿 NLD (NVPI): Platinum
💿 SWI (IFPI): Platinum
💿 US (RIAA): Platinum
📀 ITA (FIMI): Gold
* In Germany, 2× Gold = 1× Platinum.
🏅 Best-Selling Single of 1998 in the UK
🏅 Best-Selling Single of 1999 in the US
🏅 Best-Selling Single by a Female Artist of All Time in the UK
🏅 #8 on BBC's "The World's Top 10 Songs," the Only American Entry (2003)
🏅 #134 on BLENDER's "500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born" (2005)
🏅 #252 on Max's "Top 1,000 Greatest Songs of All Time" (Australia, 2012)
🏅 Robert Dimery's "10,001 Songs You Must Download Before You Die" (UK, 2013)
🏅 #17 on BILLBOARD's "25 Greatest Pop Hooks of All Time" (2015)
🏅 #6 on THE PUDDING's "Most Recognized '90s Songs Among Millennials and Gen Z" (2020)
🏅 #338 on ROLLING STONE's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" (2021)
🏅 #23 on PITCHFORK's "250 Best Songs of the 1990s" (2022)
🏅 #159 on BILLBOARD's "500 Best Pop Songs" (2023)
🏆 MUSIC WEEK Award for Top Single of the Year (UK, 1998)—Won
🏆 BILLBOARD Music Award for Hot 100 Single of the Year (1999)—Won
🏆 Danish Grammy Award for International Hit of the Year (1999)—Won
🏆 International Dance Music Award for Best Hi-NRG 12" (1999)—Won
🏆 International Dance Music Award for Best Pop 12" Dance Record (1999)—Won
🏆 Ivor Novello Award for Best-Selling UK Single (UK, 1999)—Won
🏆 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically (UK, 1999)—Won
🏆 Ivor Novello Award for International Hit of the Year (UK, 1999)—Won
🏅 Grammy Award for Record of the Year (2000)—Nominated
🏆 Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording (2000)—Won
🏆 Grammy Award for Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical (Club 69 mixes) (2000)—Won
🏆 Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems' 400,000 Spins Award (2002)—Won
📰 MUSIC & MEDIA column by Menno Visser ("On the Air"; Europe, Oct 24, 1998): "It's something of a shock to see a 52-year-old chanteuse as the hottest new entry on the European Radio Top 50 this week. The lady in question is, of course, singer/actress Cher, born in 1946 and with a recording career stretching back to 1964. She's still charming European programmers in 1998; her new single 'Believe' at No. 33 is the highest of six new entries and also the 'most added' track for the second consecutive week. Glen White, head of music at regional dance station Vibe FM which covers the east central part of England, explains why he just had to A-list Cher: 'We listen to all the new records blind, we liked this one and we were so embarrassed and surprised it was Cher that we decided to announce the record for the first two weeks on the air with her real name, Cherilyn.' The ruse worked out for the station when listeners began calling up and requesting the song."
📰 "When You 'Believe'"—BILLBOARD column by Fred Bronson ("Chart Beat," Nov 7, 1998): "When Cher topped the UK singles chart in 1991 with 'The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss),' she was 45, good enough to make her the oldest female to ever lead the British list. Now 52, Cher retains her title as she returns to the top spot with 'Believe.'"
📰 "Cher Gives Reason to 'Believe'"—BILLBOARD column by Michael Paoletta ("Dance Trax," Nov 7, 1998): "Two years have passed since Cher released IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, a gem of an album ... Imagine how worked we were to receive her new single, 'Believe,' which recently debuted at No. 1 in the UK. Not bad, eh? The Metro-produced 'Believe' is a galloping pop pleasure that will surely please fans of Eurodance. But club pundits in need of something a tad deeper have no need to worry. On board to take the song down various paths are Club 69, Xenomania, Almighty, and Phat 'n' Phunky. Whichever mix is preferred, one thing remains certain: It's the voice of Cher that shines through, loud and clear."
✍🏻 BILLBOARD single review by Chuck Taylor (Nov 14, 1998): "There's a reason why this track from Cher's upcoming BELIEVE debuted at No. 1 in the UK. A healthy dab of camp, an alluring contemporary dance-pop beat, crafty production, and a joyous and unrestrained vocal point toward the best darn thing that Cher has recorded in years. Some songs are so natural, so comfortably sung, that you wonder that somebody didn't think them up decades before. With this, you'll be whirling around the floor, tapping hard on the accelerator to 'Believe,' a simple ode to those feelings that we all search out and cling to. Cher is just a prize here; even her hardy detractors will be fighting the beat on this one. Programmers, please let go of any preconceptions you have about the artist and the decidedly European feel of this cut. It's a no-holds-barred reaction record that deserves to bring Cher back into the fold. Also available: a half-dozen remixes. Simply put, this song is the Pied Piper."
💬 Nigel Dick, director of the music video (1998): "The concept incorporates ideas discussed with Cher: Mechanical Cher, Regular Cher, and Cher as a guardian angel who appears and disappears. We wanted something linear but not necessarily a full A–Z story. The lighting and vibe needed to feel contemporary and youthful. The shoot was planned for two days; Cher was needed for one, including a few hours of night work on the roof. In London it was pelting rain, cold, and wet, yet Cher never complained or said a word. I was very impressed. She said, 'When I'm at home I like people to be nice to me. When I'm on set I like to work.' Some artists could learn a thing or two from Cher."
📰 "Cher: Back to the Dance Floor!"—DANCE MUSIC AUTHORITY cover story by Johnny Danza and Dean Ferguson (Jan 1999): "An artist like Cher could be expected to rest comfortably on the laurels of a catalog that already includes some of the most indelible pop anthems of all time. Think again. Her new album, BELIEVE, is a knockout, with the blockbuster title track currently exploding on both sides of the Atlantic. The remixing talent roster on the first single alone reads like a who's who of cutting-edge club fare (Almighty, Xenomania, Wayne G, Club 69). Yet, it's still, unmistakably, a Cher record. '"Believe" was just the obvious choice for the first single everywhere,' Cher says. 'It's the best song on the album.'
📰 "The evolution of the album's chart-charging first single, with its infectious, singalong chorus and ear-catching vocal flutter, is a story in itself. 'We had done the song, and we loved the chorus, but the verse was just shit.' Later, while soaking in a bathtub, Cher herself came up with the line 'I've had time to think it through/And maybe I'm too good for you,' and suddenly the whole song made sense. Cher told us that the track's unique vocal hooks were inspired by a similar sound effect that she'd heard on an album by Roachford. She met with some initial resistance, however, when she tried getting the boys to experiment with her own vocal tracks in the same way. Finally, they relented. 'Mark added the compression to the first part of the vocal so that it sounds like it's coming out of an old radio speaker, then we started screwing around with the pitch machine. We put that on, looked at each other, and said, "That's it!"' Cher knew instantly that she had nailed it. 'From that moment on, it was my favorite song. I said "I'm calling the album BELIEVE, and 'Believe' is going to be the first single."'
📰 "Still, others involved needed some convincing. [Executive producer] Rob Dickins, for one, tried his best to dissuade her, arguing that it just didn't sound like a Cher record. 'Rob tried to talk me out of using "that weird thing" on my voice, and finally we all had a big meeting.' Cher sat down with everyone involved in the project and said, "I understand that at first, it doesn't sound like me—but eventually, it does—and if you want to change the mechanical stuff... I want you to know that it will be over my dead body."' Suffice it to say the 'mechanical stuff' stayed, and the single debuted at No. 1 in the UK.
📰 'It had been 33 years since the last time that had happened to me [with Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" in 1965], so I was pretty excited. We were at a Blockbuster in Italy when we heard.' Her manager, Billy Sammeth, was waiting in the car when Cher got the call on her cell phone. 'I was banging on the door, going "We're number one!" but he couldn't hear me.' She says that he just went 'yeah-yeah-great,' but still had no idea what she was trying to tell him. 'Then he understood, and we were all jumping around. The people around us probably thought we were insane, but eventually they understood [and] then everyone was jumping around. It was great.'"
📰 "Who'd Ever 'Believe' It? Cher Is a Hit Again: Aging Diva Shows She Can Turn Back Time with Disco Tune"—NEW YORK DAILY NEWS feature (Feb 1, 1999): "If anyone said one month ago that a vintage-sounding disco song recorded by a woman in her 50s would become a major US hit, you'd check to see what they'd been drinking. Even the woman in question, Cher, didn't think she had much of a shot with the song ('Believe'), despite its killer hook and amazing beat. But in just the last few weeks, the song has been shaping up as Cher's biggest hit since 1989's 'If I Could Turn Back Time,' back when she tailored her music to meet the peak of the hair-metal trend. Considering that last night Cher upped her profile by some eight zillion viewers after performing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at the Super Bowl, expect her song to go top 10 next week, with the like-titled album soon to follow ... How satisfying this must be for her, because not only had her career been stone-cold, but it also has been 34 years since her first major US solo hit, a cover of Dylan's 'All I Really Want to Do' in 1965. Which just goes to show, never discount a past star's future.
📰 "The song had actually been a smash across Europe early in the fall, racking up more time on the No. 1 perch in England than any single of the last year. The 1.7m copies sold in Britain make it the biggest song by a female performer there, ever. Still, overseas tastes hardly dictate those over here. Europe has long worshiped zippy pop-dance tracks like 'Believe,' while in America these days you can hear songs like that only in clubs catering to gay men. No wonder Cher didn't express much faith in the song's US success when we spoke last month. 'Radio didn't play my last album at all [the ballad-dominated IT'S A MAN'S WORLD],' the star said. 'So I don't know what they'll make of this. It's really all up to radio. And I don't have any idea what radio plays these days.'"
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Mar 6, 1999): "Music Control detected an estimated audience of more than 86m for Britney Spears' debut single '...Baby One More Time' last week. Only Cher's 'Believe' has drawn a larger one-week audience [91.6m] in the history of the chart."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("American Chartwatch"; UK, Mar 6, 1999): "'Believe' passed the 1m sales mark [in the US] last week, and is currently selling more than 100,000 copies a week."
📰 "Cher Resurrected, Again, by a Hit; The Long, Hard, but Serendipitous Road to 'Believe'"—THE NEW YORK TIMES feature by Neil Strauss (Mar 11, 1999): "To a listener, 'Believe' may sound like a sure hit regardless of the performer's history. The verses are rich and bittersweet, with the added gimmick of breaking up Cher's voice through an effect that makes her sound robotic. And the choruses are catchy and uplifting, with Cher wailing, 'Do you believe in life after love?' All of it bounces over a bed of 1980s-style electronic dance pop. It is a song with a universal theme—a woman trying to convince herself that she can survive a breakup—that has crossed pop borders to appeal to old and young, mainstream and alternative music fans, and even those who have little affinity for contemporary pop.
📰 "So where does a hit like 'Believe' come from? There are six songwriters credited with writing the single. Of those, Cher knows only one. Digging deeper, at least four others, including Cher, contributed to the music and lyrics of 'Believe' but are not credited on the record because there were already too many people listed. How much work, how many people and how much luck does it take to make a four-minute pop song?
📰 "'Believe' began nine years ago in a small flat in Sussex, England. Brian Higgins was 23 and trying to teach himself how to write songs. He sat at the keyboard, lifted his fingers to play a few chords and it happened. 'The lyrics and the melody just flowed out at the same time,' he said. Five years later Mr. Higgins' career began to blossom, and he started getting odd jobs with such pop stars as Diana Ross, Dannii Minogue, and Pulp. Practically every time Mr. Higgins met with an artist, he played them his unborn dance song, 'Believe,' but no one showed the slightest interest.
📰 In the meantime, Rob Dickins, president of London-based Warner Music UK, had decided that the only thing Cher could do to make up for her last album, IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, a set of rock ballads that sold disappointingly, was to focus on her gay audience with a high-energy dance record. Cher said she was not interested in dance music anymore because it was not a genre with real songs. Mr. Dickins walked away, intent on finding real songs to disprove her argument. That was when a chance encounter set the wheels in motion that would make Cher a pop star again.
📰 Mr. Higgins was visiting Warner Brothers to talk about the Minogue album he had worked on. As he waited outside the office of an executive who was on the phone, Mr. Dickins happened to walk down the corridor, where he met Mr. Higgins. Mr. Dickins asked the songwriter if he would be interested in submitting a song or two for consideration for the Cher album. Three days later, a tape with 16 of Mr. Higgins' songs arrived. 'The ninth song was "Believe." I thought: "Cher could do this chorus, especially the lyrics, with her private life the way it is. She's gone through all these things."' Mr. Dickins called the songwriter the next day and asked him to complete 'Believe.' 'About a week later he comes in with the finished song and it's terrible,' Mr. Dickins said. 'I've got this great chorus and this terrible song. So I told him, "We're taking it away from you. You've done no justice to your own song."' Mr. Higgins handed over the song, admitting that he was probably too close to it.
📰 "Meanwhile Mr. Dickins had found a song for the album called 'Dov'è l'amore,' which was written by Paul Barry and Mark Taylor, an English songwriting team. Cher visited their studio in a suburb west of London with the intention of recording only that song. She said she remembered the studio, called Metro, as 'this little dungeon of a place, the smallest studio I've ever been in in my life.' Even Mr. Dickins had second thoughts about the place: 'I went down and saw Cher sitting in this horrible room on this horrible sofa and thought, "What have I done to her?"' But the chemistry was good. When Mr. Dickins sent 'Believe' to Metro studios, a staff songwriter, Steve Torch, took a crack at the verses. Mr. Dickins was not happy with the result. 'I said, "What is wrong with all you people? I've got a hit chorus and none of you can write a song,"' he said. Brian Rawling, the producer who runs Metro, begged for another chance and got it, handing the song to Mr. Barry, who kept hitting brick walls. 'I remember one version in particular that Cher didn't like,' Mr. Barry said. 'My son had just been born and I was ecstatic. One lyric Cher said was total garbage. She said, "You're too happy."'
📰 "Finally Mr. Barry's partner, Mr. Taylor, turned in a version good enough to begin working on. The lyrics began to match the strength of the chorus. Mr. Barry began putting together the music, starting with a rough drum track, a crude keyboard melody, and a bass line. He and Mr. Taylor remember trying to make a dance song that was a little different, with subtle melodies and quiet backing vocals tucked away; verses in the style of Lamont Dozier and soulful 1980s funk touches influenced by Stevie Wonder and Prince. But Mr. Dickins was still dissatisfied. He thought the eight-bar section of the song, known as the middle eight, before the final chorus which simply repeated the lyric 'I don't need you anymore,' was too repetitive and didn't take the song anywhere. This time he was ignored.
📰 "But Cher had a more pressing problem. She said the second verse was simply a repetition of the 'so sad that you're leaving' sentiment expressed in the first one. 'I thought, "You can be sad for one verse, but you can't be sad for two,"' Cher said. 'That night I was lying there in my bathtub with my toe in that little faucet, playing around with the words, and it came out in one line. I thought, "I've had time to think it through/And maybe I'm too good for you."'
📰 "But when the song was finished the verses still seemed lifeless, no matter how many different ways Cher sang them. And that was when luck smiled on 'Believe' again. One morning Cher saw a TV program featuring a singer named Andrew Roachford, whose CD she instantly bought. 'We were tackling "Believe" for the gazillionth time,' she said. 'And I said: "I'm so tired of doing this. Let's just put on this CD and listen to music and get away from this."' On one song the vocals were processed through a vocoder to sound mechanical. Cher remembers suggesting that they add something like that to 'Believe.' In the interim a new voice-tuning program had arrived in the studio, and Mr. Taylor decided to teach himself how to use it. He randomly chose two bars of 'Believe' and looped it on the computer. In his tinkering, he came across the wavering, soulful, robotic vocal sound that is now the song's most loved and recognizable element. But he was afraid that if Cher heard it, she would object to his experimenting with her vocals. 'A couple of beers later we decided to play it for her, and she just freaked out,' he said. That is, freaked out in a good way. 'We high-fived,' Cher said. 'It was like some stupid ROCKY film.'
📰 When Cher left the studio to begin filming TEA WITH MUSSOLINI, Mr. Taylor put together a quick mix of 'Believe' and sent it to Cher and Mr. Dickins, who thought they had gotten carried away with the robotic sound. 'He said, "Everyone loves that song but wants to change that part of it,"' Cher said. 'I said, "You can change that part of it, over my dead body!" And that was the end of the discussion. I said to Mark before I left, "Don't let anyone touch this track, or I'm going to rip your throat out."' And no one changed the track. That rough mix became the final version of the song."
📰 MUSIC WEEK report (UK, Mar 13, 1999): "Cher's 'Believe' has become the first single by a UK-signed artist to reach No. 1 in the States since Elton John's 'Candle in the Wind 1997.' The song has now been No. 1 in 22 countries, selling 6.7m units worldwide. Former Warner UK chairman Rob Dickins, executive producer of the track, describes the single's success as extraordinary. 'I knew when we finally got the song together it was a top-10 record. I was thrilled we'd made a hit record with Cher but had no idea it would be this big,' he says."
📈 MUSIC & MEDIA editorial by Emmanuel Legrand (Europe, Apr 10, 1999): "A few publications have recently reported that it's getting tougher for UK artists to have breakfast in America these days ... UK labels can at least have the satisfaction of noting that the song on top of BILLBOARD's singles chart for the fourth consecutive week is Cher's 'Believe,' an American artist signed to a UK label."
💬 ROLLING STONE interview with Cher by Mim Udovich (Apr 15, 1999): "[When asked if she believes in life after love] Definitely. I've experienced it. It's been a long time; I've never been alone this long."
📰 "Hip to Be Cher"—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY cover story by Benjamin Svetkey (Apr 23, 1999): "At 52, Cher has never been better—or at least bigger—thanks to a neo-disco smash called 'Believe.' The most successful song she's ever released (No. 1 in 23 countries around the world), it's not only provided her stalled career with a powerful jump start but driven her to an entirely new generation of fans. (That would be the generation that hadn't yet been born when 'I Got You Babe' ruled the charts in 1965.) All in all, it's been the most dramatic comeback Hollywood has seen since, oh, say, the last time Cher raised her career from the dead."
📰 "Cher's 'Believe' Leads the Race to Scoop Top Ivors"—MUSIC WEEK report by Paul Williams (UK, May 1, 1999): "The phenomenal global success of the song 'Believe' is on course to be crowned next month at the annual Ivor Novello Awards. Having already clocked up more than 7m singles sales around the world, the composition is now in the running for three Ivors. Warner/Chappell managing director Ed Heine is thrilled with the nominations. 'It's a great song and Cher was the perfect person to sing it,' he says. 'It was carefully put together by a number of people and, contrary to the old adage about too many cooks spoiling the broth, it looks like everybody added something.'"
📰 "Quirky but Real, the Beat Goes On"—THE NEW YORK TIMES feature by Ann Powers (Jul 7, 1999): "Cher can find her way back into relevance again and again, not because she changes with the trends but because she waits, like the sentinel of an enchanted world, and judges when it's safe to open a trade route. Her judgment hasn't always been correct, but right now it's impeccable. 'Believe' is one of those unavoidable singles that seem to characterize something about their moment, but [performed live] it exemplifies Cher's transcendence of temporal boundaries. Cher's voice is quintessential rock: impure, quirky, a fine vehicle for personality. Even the computer manipulations in 'Believe' can't make it sound like anyone else's."
📰 "Cher's 'Believe' Now Faintly Audible Everywhere in America"—THE ONION satirical report (Oct 6, 1999): "Building upon its presence in every health club, supermarket, bank, clothing store and waiting room in the US, Cher's 'Believe' was heard Monday by bauxite miners working 1.4 miles beneath the Earth's surface in a remote section of the Great Salt Lake Desert, confirming suspicions that the hit dance track is at least faintly audible everywhere in the nation. 'My miners said they heard a throbbing synthesizer sound, accompanied by some sort of painful, piercing wail, coming through the granite walls at the bottom of the shaft,' said Wilson Mining Works foreman George Connerly. 'So we turned off the turbine-powered pressure drills to get a better listen, and, sure enough, it was that Cher song.' The ubiquitous 'Believe' was also recently heard at the peak of Alaska's Mt. McKinley, in the farthest reaches of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, and in the middle of a swamp deep within the Florida Everglades."
📰 "'All or Nothing': In Cher's Case, It Would Be All"—BILLBOARD column by Michael Paoletta ("Dance Trax," Dec 25, 1999): "One year ago, we pondered the future of Cher's 'Believe.' Although the single was a No. 1 pop hit throughout much of Europe, we weren't quite sure if it would be able to repeat the process in the US. At the time, only club DJs and punters had embraced the song, resulting in a No. 1 smash on BILLBOARD's Hot Dance Club Play chart. We knew the song was still in its infancy, and with fingers crossed, we prayed that radio, as well as mainstream America, would open its ears. In two words: It did. In addition to topping the BILLBOARD Hot 100, 'Believe' spent 21 weeks atop the Hot Dance Maxi-Singles Sales chart, making it the longest-running No. 1 single in that chart's history. According to SoundScan, the single and album have sold 1.8m and 2.9m units, respectively. But the good news doesn't end there. With this issue, 'Believe,' the single, becomes the No. 1 song of 1999 on the Hot 100, Hot Dance Club Play, and Hot Dance Maxi-Singles Sales charts. Are we smiling? Try beaming!"
✍🏻 THE NEW ROLLING STONE ALBUM GUIDE retrospective review by Nathan Brackett and Christian David Hoard (2004): "In her 50s, Cher had done an iconistic variation on her iconhood. 'Believe,' her 1998 electronicized pop stroke, is a piece of music beloved by everyone from grocery-store moms to Damon Albarn of Blur, who pronounced it 'brilliant.'"
✍🏻 "The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born"—BLENDER restrospective review (Oct 2005): "Do you believe in life after Rob Camilletti? 25 years had passed since she'd last had a No. 1 hit [in the US], and Cher didn't think a heavily-vocoded disco anthem was the key to her comeback strategy. 'We argued the whole way through,' she said of the recording process. But 'Believe' was a monster, sculpted in the studio to dance-floor perfection and retaining Cher's signature woman-of-a-certain-age assuredness. It was an empowerment anthem only technology could have produced."
✍🏻 "A Powerhouse Renaissance for the Goddess of Pop"—SO SO GAY review of the album CLOSER TO THE TRUTH by Ed Brody (UK, Sept 23, 2013): "It's easy to forget what a monolithic megahit 'Believe' was in 1998, and easy to underestimate the effect it had on the pop scene. By placing a vocoder twang on Cher's eminently recognisable contralto, it instantly and entirely refreshed her sound and rejuvenated her standing amongst the nouveau-riche, melisma-mangling divas on the '90s pop charts. In the wake of 'Believe,' this souped-up Auto-Tune, which created the warbled vocoder effect, became broadly implemented across mainstream pop music."
✍🏻 FREAKY TRIGGER retrospective review by Tom Ewing (UK, July 24, 2014): "In an age of one-week wonders, 'Believe' was a phenomenon—a massive global hit, bossing the charts for close to two months. It has a formidable legacy: a triumphant capstone for Cher's career, setting the tone for a surge of dance-pop successes and opening the pop career of Brian Higgins and Xenomania, whose idiosyncratic approach would illuminate the early 2000s. Except none of that matters. The song's place in history has been filled by that unnatural bend in Cher's voice—the moment the public discovered Auto-Tune. So 'Believe' stops being a rather good pop song about rubbing your ex's face in their folly and instead becomes Patient Zero in an epidemic that defines or ruins modern pop. All debate and disdain over Auto-Tune start here, and all of it since lands back here. Cher, what have you done?
✍🏻 "Before talking about what 'Believe' does specifically, a couple of points. First, Auto-Tune is not a magic wand; it's a brand—a software package for pitch correction, like Hoover or Google—not the first, not the last, but the one whose fame hit at the right time. Second, 'Believe' isn't the first number-one record to use it. I don't know what is either. The point about Auto-Tune is that when you hear it like 'Believe' uses it, you're meant to hear it. Ordinarily, it should be invisible. 'Believe' is the sound of technology being abused, pushed beyond design. The standard debate around pitch correction—are singers deceiving the public?—is irrelevant to 'Believe.' It's like criticising THE MATRIX's bullet time for stunt-doubling. Technology taken beyond its limits just to see what happens—that's pop history. From amplification came distortion. From drum machines came acid house. And from pitch correction comes Cher's wonderful cyborg bravura. Once those limits were breached—to Cher's delight and her label's reported distress, at least until the money came in—anyone could jump beyond them.
✍🏻 "Back to 1998: most people thought the pitch-bending was a vocoder, and vocal distortion wasn't uncommon in 90s dance. Still, the way Cher used vocal tricks—mutating words—was startling and effective. If you've somehow missed 'Believe' in the last 15 years, you might be surprised how little Auto-Tune extremity there is—occasional verse words, with the chorus mostly pure Cher. The defiant belt-out is barely adulterated, just what even a technophobe fan might want. Would it have been a smash without Auto-Tune? Maybe not, but separating the two is foolish: if the trickery made 'Believe' a hit, the song's strength sustained it. The pitchbending suits Cher—her deep, showy vowels already verge on comic-book emphasis, so going over the top is perfect. It fits the song too: 'Believe' is an 'I Will Survive'-style anthem of embattled romantic defiance.
✍🏻 "The genius is how aggressive and righteous Cher makes it. There are records sung by divas, and there are records that need divas to sing them. This is the latter—without Cher's weight of performance and life experience behind it, the dread admonition of 'I really don't think you're strong enough' might fall flat. In this context—using strength to turn weakness into victory—what does Auto-Tune do? In 90s terms, before its familiar use cases, the effect seems like CGI for the voice: obviously artificial but thrilling, a liquefying and reforming of Cher's singing mid-word. Cher isn't just bouncing back from heartbreak, she's becoming something more than human to do it. No wonder everyone else wanted an upgrade. Score: 8/10."
✍🏻 "25 Greatest Pop Hooks of All Time"—BILLBOARD retrospective review (Nov 12, 2015): "Long before T-Pain and Future co-opted Auto-Tune, Cher was the first pop artist to employ the filter on her smash single 'Believe.' Without the effect, the hook is strong, but there's something about computerizing her vocals that adds a dimension to the chorus that still feels futuristic, years after its release."
✍🏻 "Cher Brings the Future of Pop with 'Believe'"—ROLLING STONE retrospective review by Christopher R. Weingarten (Oct 15, 2018): "This Friday, October 19th, marks the 20th anniversary of Cher's 'Believe,' the hit that predicted our future of techno-bubblegum and robo-warble. A massive success in 1998 and 1999, it introduced the world to Auto-Tune, the once-maligned, now-ubiquitous software that melts a singer's voice into uncanny perfection, forever changing pop music. With the pitch correction software less than two years old, producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling used it not to fix mistakes in Cher's iconic voice but as an aesthetic tool. 'Basically, it was the destruction of her voice, so I was really nervous about playing it to her!' Taylor told SOUND ON SOUND in 1999. However, don't take his quotes too seriously: he told the magazine it was actually a vocoder pedal to preserve their secret formula. 'She was fantastic—she just said, 'It sounds great!' so the effect stayed.' From there, the next 20 years would grow increasingly drenched in the stuff, fueling Daft Punk, T-Pain, Kanye West's 808S & HEARTBREAK, Future, Travis Scott, and Lil Uzi Vert. Swaths of contemporary African dance music—Algerian rai, Nigerian Afrobeats—are likewise soaked in Auto-Tune's signature gurgle."
✍🏻 PITCHFORK retrospective review by Allison Hussey (UK; Sept 27, 2022): "'Believe' marked a new era, for Cher and for popular music. For the first time on top 40 radio, Auto-Tune—producers' open-secret weapon for perfecting vocal takes—was laid bare for all to hear, on purpose, a reversal of its typical clandestine use. As she sings about trying to regain her footing after heartbreak, Cher's voice warbles with synthetic oscillation. Warner executives initially scoffed at the effect, but 'Believe' became one of Cher's biggest career hits ... Just as the song's production reveals the guts of its operation, Cher's wide-open vocals exposes her own emotional vulnerability. She isn't too good to admit she's not hurting, and she powers through toward salvation, declaring 'I don't need you anymore' as the song hits its peak. And coming from Cher—a confident, charismatic, and massively talented woman who'd been subjected to frequent public ridicule over her personal life—'Believe' took on an extra survivalist edge. Nearly 25 years later, it still dazzles in its defiance."
✍🏻 POPMATTERS retrospective review by Peter Piatkowski (Dec 7, 2022): "After the muted response to IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, she came back in 1998 with BELIEVE and its monster hit single, which reinvented Cher—yet again—this time as a robotic dance diva. Her throaty yodel was pinched, squeezed, and chopped with studio effects, rendering her almost unrecognizable on the song. The anonymity in 'Believe' is an unfortunate side effect of some of Cher's most successful hits. Anyone could have sung on that record. The massive success of that single and its parent album gave Cher a new career she held for the ensuing decades."
🥇 FIN: #1 (9w)
🥇 SPA: #1 (9w)
🥇 ITA: #1 (7w)
🥇 SCO: #1 (7w)
🥇 UK: #1 (7w)
🥇 IRE: #1 (6w)
🥇 NOR: #1 (6w)
🥇 AUS: #1 (5w)
🥇 CAN Quebec: #1 (5w)
🥇 SWE: #1 (5w)
🥇 DNK: #1 (4w)
🥇 GER: #1 (4w)
🥇 SWI: #1 (4w)
🥇 US: #1 (4w)
🥇 BEL Wallonia: #1 (3w)
🥇 CAN: #1 (3w)
🥇 NLD: #1 (2w)
🥇 BEL Flanders: #1 (1w)
🥇 FRA: #1 (1w)
🥇 NZ: #1 (1w)
🥇 US Dance Sales: #1 (21w)
🥇 ITA Sales: #1 (13w)
🥇 DNK Sales: #1 (10w)
🥇 FIN Airplay: #1 (9w)
🥇 SCA Airplay: #1 (9w)
🥇 NLD Airplay: #1 (7w)
🥇 BEL Sales: #1 (6w)
🥇 HUN Airplay: #1 (6w)
🥇 UK Airplay: #1 (6w)
🥇 CAN Dance: #1 (5w)
🥇 EUR Airplay: #1 (5w)
🥇 GSA Airplay: #1 (5w)
🥇 LAT Airplay: #1 (5w)
🥇 US Dance Club Play: #1 (5w)
🥇 US Top 40 Tracks: #1 (5w)
🥇 CAN AC: #1 (4w)
🥇 EUR Radio Adds: #1 (4w)
🥇 US Sales: #1 (4w)
🥇 UK (MTV): #1 (3w)
🥇 HUN Sales: #1 (2w)
🥇 FRA Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥇 GRC Sales: #1 (1w)
🥇 CRI Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥈 AUT: #2
🥈 CAN Sales: #2
🥈 MEX: #2
🥈 US Airplay: #2
🥉 POL Airplay: #3
🥉 SLV Airplay: #3
🥉 US AC: #3
🌟 PRI Airplay: #4
🌟 US Dance Digital Sales (2021): #4
🌟 ISL: #5
🌟 ITA Airplay: #5
🌟 FIN Sales: #6
🚀 US Rhythmic Airplay: #17
🚀 CAN Digital Sales (2023): #19
🚀 ISR International Airplay (2025): #19
💎 FRA (SNEP): Diamond
💿💿💿💿💿 UK (BPI): 5× Platinum
💿💿💿 AUS (ARIA): 3× Platinum
💿💿💿 BEL (BRMA): 3× Platinum
💿💿📀 GER (BVMI): 5× Gold *
💿💿💿 SWE (IFPI): 3× Platinum
💿💿 NOR (IFPI): 2× Platinum
💿💿 NZ (RMNZ): 2× Platinum
💿 NLD (NVPI): Platinum
💿 SWI (IFPI): Platinum
💿 US (RIAA): Platinum
📀 ITA (FIMI): Gold
* In Germany, 2× Gold = 1× Platinum.
🏅 Best-Selling Single of 1998 in the UK
🏅 Best-Selling Single of 1999 in the US
🏅 Best-Selling Single by a Female Artist of All Time in the UK
🏅 #8 on BBC's "The World's Top 10 Songs," the Only American Entry (2003)
🏅 #134 on BLENDER's "500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born" (2005)
🏅 #252 on Max's "Top 1,000 Greatest Songs of All Time" (Australia, 2012)
🏅 Robert Dimery's "10,001 Songs You Must Download Before You Die" (UK, 2013)
🏅 #17 on BILLBOARD's "25 Greatest Pop Hooks of All Time" (2015)
🏅 #6 on THE PUDDING's "Most Recognized '90s Songs Among Millennials and Gen Z" (2020)
🏅 #338 on ROLLING STONE's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" (2021)
🏅 #23 on PITCHFORK's "250 Best Songs of the 1990s" (2022)
🏅 #159 on BILLBOARD's "500 Best Pop Songs" (2023)
🏆 MUSIC WEEK Award for Top Single of the Year (UK, 1998)—Won
🏆 BILLBOARD Music Award for Hot 100 Single of the Year (1999)—Won
🏆 Danish Grammy Award for International Hit of the Year (1999)—Won
🏆 International Dance Music Award for Best Hi-NRG 12" (1999)—Won
🏆 International Dance Music Award for Best Pop 12" Dance Record (1999)—Won
🏆 Ivor Novello Award for Best-Selling UK Single (UK, 1999)—Won
🏆 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically (UK, 1999)—Won
🏆 Ivor Novello Award for International Hit of the Year (UK, 1999)—Won
🏅 Grammy Award for Record of the Year (2000)—Nominated
🏆 Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording (2000)—Won
🏆 Grammy Award for Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical (Club 69 mixes) (2000)—Won
🏆 Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems' 400,000 Spins Award (2002)—Won
📰 MUSIC & MEDIA column by Menno Visser ("On the Air"; Europe, Oct 24, 1998): "It's something of a shock to see a 52-year-old chanteuse as the hottest new entry on the European Radio Top 50 this week. The lady in question is, of course, singer/actress Cher, born in 1946 and with a recording career stretching back to 1964. She's still charming European programmers in 1998; her new single 'Believe' at No. 33 is the highest of six new entries and also the 'most added' track for the second consecutive week. Glen White, head of music at regional dance station Vibe FM which covers the east central part of England, explains why he just had to A-list Cher: 'We listen to all the new records blind, we liked this one and we were so embarrassed and surprised it was Cher that we decided to announce the record for the first two weeks on the air with her real name, Cherilyn.' The ruse worked out for the station when listeners began calling up and requesting the song."
📰 "When You 'Believe'"—BILLBOARD column by Fred Bronson ("Chart Beat," Nov 7, 1998): "When Cher topped the UK singles chart in 1991 with 'The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss),' she was 45, good enough to make her the oldest female to ever lead the British list. Now 52, Cher retains her title as she returns to the top spot with 'Believe.'"
📰 "Cher Gives Reason to 'Believe'"—BILLBOARD column by Michael Paoletta ("Dance Trax," Nov 7, 1998): "Two years have passed since Cher released IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, a gem of an album ... Imagine how worked we were to receive her new single, 'Believe,' which recently debuted at No. 1 in the UK. Not bad, eh? The Metro-produced 'Believe' is a galloping pop pleasure that will surely please fans of Eurodance. But club pundits in need of something a tad deeper have no need to worry. On board to take the song down various paths are Club 69, Xenomania, Almighty, and Phat 'n' Phunky. Whichever mix is preferred, one thing remains certain: It's the voice of Cher that shines through, loud and clear."
✍🏻 BILLBOARD single review by Chuck Taylor (Nov 14, 1998): "There's a reason why this track from Cher's upcoming BELIEVE debuted at No. 1 in the UK. A healthy dab of camp, an alluring contemporary dance-pop beat, crafty production, and a joyous and unrestrained vocal point toward the best darn thing that Cher has recorded in years. Some songs are so natural, so comfortably sung, that you wonder that somebody didn't think them up decades before. With this, you'll be whirling around the floor, tapping hard on the accelerator to 'Believe,' a simple ode to those feelings that we all search out and cling to. Cher is just a prize here; even her hardy detractors will be fighting the beat on this one. Programmers, please let go of any preconceptions you have about the artist and the decidedly European feel of this cut. It's a no-holds-barred reaction record that deserves to bring Cher back into the fold. Also available: a half-dozen remixes. Simply put, this song is the Pied Piper."
💬 Nigel Dick, director of the music video (1998): "The concept incorporates ideas discussed with Cher: Mechanical Cher, Regular Cher, and Cher as a guardian angel who appears and disappears. We wanted something linear but not necessarily a full A–Z story. The lighting and vibe needed to feel contemporary and youthful. The shoot was planned for two days; Cher was needed for one, including a few hours of night work on the roof. In London it was pelting rain, cold, and wet, yet Cher never complained or said a word. I was very impressed. She said, 'When I'm at home I like people to be nice to me. When I'm on set I like to work.' Some artists could learn a thing or two from Cher."
📰 "Cher: Back to the Dance Floor!"—DANCE MUSIC AUTHORITY cover story by Johnny Danza and Dean Ferguson (Jan 1999): "An artist like Cher could be expected to rest comfortably on the laurels of a catalog that already includes some of the most indelible pop anthems of all time. Think again. Her new album, BELIEVE, is a knockout, with the blockbuster title track currently exploding on both sides of the Atlantic. The remixing talent roster on the first single alone reads like a who's who of cutting-edge club fare (Almighty, Xenomania, Wayne G, Club 69). Yet, it's still, unmistakably, a Cher record. '"Believe" was just the obvious choice for the first single everywhere,' Cher says. 'It's the best song on the album.'
📰 "The evolution of the album's chart-charging first single, with its infectious, singalong chorus and ear-catching vocal flutter, is a story in itself. 'We had done the song, and we loved the chorus, but the verse was just shit.' Later, while soaking in a bathtub, Cher herself came up with the line 'I've had time to think it through/And maybe I'm too good for you,' and suddenly the whole song made sense. Cher told us that the track's unique vocal hooks were inspired by a similar sound effect that she'd heard on an album by Roachford. She met with some initial resistance, however, when she tried getting the boys to experiment with her own vocal tracks in the same way. Finally, they relented. 'Mark added the compression to the first part of the vocal so that it sounds like it's coming out of an old radio speaker, then we started screwing around with the pitch machine. We put that on, looked at each other, and said, "That's it!"' Cher knew instantly that she had nailed it. 'From that moment on, it was my favorite song. I said "I'm calling the album BELIEVE, and 'Believe' is going to be the first single."'
📰 "Still, others involved needed some convincing. [Executive producer] Rob Dickins, for one, tried his best to dissuade her, arguing that it just didn't sound like a Cher record. 'Rob tried to talk me out of using "that weird thing" on my voice, and finally we all had a big meeting.' Cher sat down with everyone involved in the project and said, "I understand that at first, it doesn't sound like me—but eventually, it does—and if you want to change the mechanical stuff... I want you to know that it will be over my dead body."' Suffice it to say the 'mechanical stuff' stayed, and the single debuted at No. 1 in the UK.
📰 'It had been 33 years since the last time that had happened to me [with Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" in 1965], so I was pretty excited. We were at a Blockbuster in Italy when we heard.' Her manager, Billy Sammeth, was waiting in the car when Cher got the call on her cell phone. 'I was banging on the door, going "We're number one!" but he couldn't hear me.' She says that he just went 'yeah-yeah-great,' but still had no idea what she was trying to tell him. 'Then he understood, and we were all jumping around. The people around us probably thought we were insane, but eventually they understood [and] then everyone was jumping around. It was great.'"
📰 "Who'd Ever 'Believe' It? Cher Is a Hit Again: Aging Diva Shows She Can Turn Back Time with Disco Tune"—NEW YORK DAILY NEWS feature (Feb 1, 1999): "If anyone said one month ago that a vintage-sounding disco song recorded by a woman in her 50s would become a major US hit, you'd check to see what they'd been drinking. Even the woman in question, Cher, didn't think she had much of a shot with the song ('Believe'), despite its killer hook and amazing beat. But in just the last few weeks, the song has been shaping up as Cher's biggest hit since 1989's 'If I Could Turn Back Time,' back when she tailored her music to meet the peak of the hair-metal trend. Considering that last night Cher upped her profile by some eight zillion viewers after performing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at the Super Bowl, expect her song to go top 10 next week, with the like-titled album soon to follow ... How satisfying this must be for her, because not only had her career been stone-cold, but it also has been 34 years since her first major US solo hit, a cover of Dylan's 'All I Really Want to Do' in 1965. Which just goes to show, never discount a past star's future.
📰 "The song had actually been a smash across Europe early in the fall, racking up more time on the No. 1 perch in England than any single of the last year. The 1.7m copies sold in Britain make it the biggest song by a female performer there, ever. Still, overseas tastes hardly dictate those over here. Europe has long worshiped zippy pop-dance tracks like 'Believe,' while in America these days you can hear songs like that only in clubs catering to gay men. No wonder Cher didn't express much faith in the song's US success when we spoke last month. 'Radio didn't play my last album at all [the ballad-dominated IT'S A MAN'S WORLD],' the star said. 'So I don't know what they'll make of this. It's really all up to radio. And I don't have any idea what radio plays these days.'"
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Mar 6, 1999): "Music Control detected an estimated audience of more than 86m for Britney Spears' debut single '...Baby One More Time' last week. Only Cher's 'Believe' has drawn a larger one-week audience [91.6m] in the history of the chart."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("American Chartwatch"; UK, Mar 6, 1999): "'Believe' passed the 1m sales mark [in the US] last week, and is currently selling more than 100,000 copies a week."
📰 "Cher Resurrected, Again, by a Hit; The Long, Hard, but Serendipitous Road to 'Believe'"—THE NEW YORK TIMES feature by Neil Strauss (Mar 11, 1999): "To a listener, 'Believe' may sound like a sure hit regardless of the performer's history. The verses are rich and bittersweet, with the added gimmick of breaking up Cher's voice through an effect that makes her sound robotic. And the choruses are catchy and uplifting, with Cher wailing, 'Do you believe in life after love?' All of it bounces over a bed of 1980s-style electronic dance pop. It is a song with a universal theme—a woman trying to convince herself that she can survive a breakup—that has crossed pop borders to appeal to old and young, mainstream and alternative music fans, and even those who have little affinity for contemporary pop.
📰 "So where does a hit like 'Believe' come from? There are six songwriters credited with writing the single. Of those, Cher knows only one. Digging deeper, at least four others, including Cher, contributed to the music and lyrics of 'Believe' but are not credited on the record because there were already too many people listed. How much work, how many people and how much luck does it take to make a four-minute pop song?
📰 "'Believe' began nine years ago in a small flat in Sussex, England. Brian Higgins was 23 and trying to teach himself how to write songs. He sat at the keyboard, lifted his fingers to play a few chords and it happened. 'The lyrics and the melody just flowed out at the same time,' he said. Five years later Mr. Higgins' career began to blossom, and he started getting odd jobs with such pop stars as Diana Ross, Dannii Minogue, and Pulp. Practically every time Mr. Higgins met with an artist, he played them his unborn dance song, 'Believe,' but no one showed the slightest interest.
📰 In the meantime, Rob Dickins, president of London-based Warner Music UK, had decided that the only thing Cher could do to make up for her last album, IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, a set of rock ballads that sold disappointingly, was to focus on her gay audience with a high-energy dance record. Cher said she was not interested in dance music anymore because it was not a genre with real songs. Mr. Dickins walked away, intent on finding real songs to disprove her argument. That was when a chance encounter set the wheels in motion that would make Cher a pop star again.
📰 Mr. Higgins was visiting Warner Brothers to talk about the Minogue album he had worked on. As he waited outside the office of an executive who was on the phone, Mr. Dickins happened to walk down the corridor, where he met Mr. Higgins. Mr. Dickins asked the songwriter if he would be interested in submitting a song or two for consideration for the Cher album. Three days later, a tape with 16 of Mr. Higgins' songs arrived. 'The ninth song was "Believe." I thought: "Cher could do this chorus, especially the lyrics, with her private life the way it is. She's gone through all these things."' Mr. Dickins called the songwriter the next day and asked him to complete 'Believe.' 'About a week later he comes in with the finished song and it's terrible,' Mr. Dickins said. 'I've got this great chorus and this terrible song. So I told him, "We're taking it away from you. You've done no justice to your own song."' Mr. Higgins handed over the song, admitting that he was probably too close to it.
📰 "Meanwhile Mr. Dickins had found a song for the album called 'Dov'è l'amore,' which was written by Paul Barry and Mark Taylor, an English songwriting team. Cher visited their studio in a suburb west of London with the intention of recording only that song. She said she remembered the studio, called Metro, as 'this little dungeon of a place, the smallest studio I've ever been in in my life.' Even Mr. Dickins had second thoughts about the place: 'I went down and saw Cher sitting in this horrible room on this horrible sofa and thought, "What have I done to her?"' But the chemistry was good. When Mr. Dickins sent 'Believe' to Metro studios, a staff songwriter, Steve Torch, took a crack at the verses. Mr. Dickins was not happy with the result. 'I said, "What is wrong with all you people? I've got a hit chorus and none of you can write a song,"' he said. Brian Rawling, the producer who runs Metro, begged for another chance and got it, handing the song to Mr. Barry, who kept hitting brick walls. 'I remember one version in particular that Cher didn't like,' Mr. Barry said. 'My son had just been born and I was ecstatic. One lyric Cher said was total garbage. She said, "You're too happy."'
📰 "Finally Mr. Barry's partner, Mr. Taylor, turned in a version good enough to begin working on. The lyrics began to match the strength of the chorus. Mr. Barry began putting together the music, starting with a rough drum track, a crude keyboard melody, and a bass line. He and Mr. Taylor remember trying to make a dance song that was a little different, with subtle melodies and quiet backing vocals tucked away; verses in the style of Lamont Dozier and soulful 1980s funk touches influenced by Stevie Wonder and Prince. But Mr. Dickins was still dissatisfied. He thought the eight-bar section of the song, known as the middle eight, before the final chorus which simply repeated the lyric 'I don't need you anymore,' was too repetitive and didn't take the song anywhere. This time he was ignored.
📰 "But Cher had a more pressing problem. She said the second verse was simply a repetition of the 'so sad that you're leaving' sentiment expressed in the first one. 'I thought, "You can be sad for one verse, but you can't be sad for two,"' Cher said. 'That night I was lying there in my bathtub with my toe in that little faucet, playing around with the words, and it came out in one line. I thought, "I've had time to think it through/And maybe I'm too good for you."'
📰 "But when the song was finished the verses still seemed lifeless, no matter how many different ways Cher sang them. And that was when luck smiled on 'Believe' again. One morning Cher saw a TV program featuring a singer named Andrew Roachford, whose CD she instantly bought. 'We were tackling "Believe" for the gazillionth time,' she said. 'And I said: "I'm so tired of doing this. Let's just put on this CD and listen to music and get away from this."' On one song the vocals were processed through a vocoder to sound mechanical. Cher remembers suggesting that they add something like that to 'Believe.' In the interim a new voice-tuning program had arrived in the studio, and Mr. Taylor decided to teach himself how to use it. He randomly chose two bars of 'Believe' and looped it on the computer. In his tinkering, he came across the wavering, soulful, robotic vocal sound that is now the song's most loved and recognizable element. But he was afraid that if Cher heard it, she would object to his experimenting with her vocals. 'A couple of beers later we decided to play it for her, and she just freaked out,' he said. That is, freaked out in a good way. 'We high-fived,' Cher said. 'It was like some stupid ROCKY film.'
📰 When Cher left the studio to begin filming TEA WITH MUSSOLINI, Mr. Taylor put together a quick mix of 'Believe' and sent it to Cher and Mr. Dickins, who thought they had gotten carried away with the robotic sound. 'He said, "Everyone loves that song but wants to change that part of it,"' Cher said. 'I said, "You can change that part of it, over my dead body!" And that was the end of the discussion. I said to Mark before I left, "Don't let anyone touch this track, or I'm going to rip your throat out."' And no one changed the track. That rough mix became the final version of the song."
📰 MUSIC WEEK report (UK, Mar 13, 1999): "Cher's 'Believe' has become the first single by a UK-signed artist to reach No. 1 in the States since Elton John's 'Candle in the Wind 1997.' The song has now been No. 1 in 22 countries, selling 6.7m units worldwide. Former Warner UK chairman Rob Dickins, executive producer of the track, describes the single's success as extraordinary. 'I knew when we finally got the song together it was a top-10 record. I was thrilled we'd made a hit record with Cher but had no idea it would be this big,' he says."
📈 MUSIC & MEDIA editorial by Emmanuel Legrand (Europe, Apr 10, 1999): "A few publications have recently reported that it's getting tougher for UK artists to have breakfast in America these days ... UK labels can at least have the satisfaction of noting that the song on top of BILLBOARD's singles chart for the fourth consecutive week is Cher's 'Believe,' an American artist signed to a UK label."
💬 ROLLING STONE interview with Cher by Mim Udovich (Apr 15, 1999): "[When asked if she believes in life after love] Definitely. I've experienced it. It's been a long time; I've never been alone this long."
📰 "Hip to Be Cher"—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY cover story by Benjamin Svetkey (Apr 23, 1999): "At 52, Cher has never been better—or at least bigger—thanks to a neo-disco smash called 'Believe.' The most successful song she's ever released (No. 1 in 23 countries around the world), it's not only provided her stalled career with a powerful jump start but driven her to an entirely new generation of fans. (That would be the generation that hadn't yet been born when 'I Got You Babe' ruled the charts in 1965.) All in all, it's been the most dramatic comeback Hollywood has seen since, oh, say, the last time Cher raised her career from the dead."
📰 "Cher's 'Believe' Leads the Race to Scoop Top Ivors"—MUSIC WEEK report by Paul Williams (UK, May 1, 1999): "The phenomenal global success of the song 'Believe' is on course to be crowned next month at the annual Ivor Novello Awards. Having already clocked up more than 7m singles sales around the world, the composition is now in the running for three Ivors. Warner/Chappell managing director Ed Heine is thrilled with the nominations. 'It's a great song and Cher was the perfect person to sing it,' he says. 'It was carefully put together by a number of people and, contrary to the old adage about too many cooks spoiling the broth, it looks like everybody added something.'"
📰 "Quirky but Real, the Beat Goes On"—THE NEW YORK TIMES feature by Ann Powers (Jul 7, 1999): "Cher can find her way back into relevance again and again, not because she changes with the trends but because she waits, like the sentinel of an enchanted world, and judges when it's safe to open a trade route. Her judgment hasn't always been correct, but right now it's impeccable. 'Believe' is one of those unavoidable singles that seem to characterize something about their moment, but [performed live] it exemplifies Cher's transcendence of temporal boundaries. Cher's voice is quintessential rock: impure, quirky, a fine vehicle for personality. Even the computer manipulations in 'Believe' can't make it sound like anyone else's."
📰 "Cher's 'Believe' Now Faintly Audible Everywhere in America"—THE ONION satirical report (Oct 6, 1999): "Building upon its presence in every health club, supermarket, bank, clothing store and waiting room in the US, Cher's 'Believe' was heard Monday by bauxite miners working 1.4 miles beneath the Earth's surface in a remote section of the Great Salt Lake Desert, confirming suspicions that the hit dance track is at least faintly audible everywhere in the nation. 'My miners said they heard a throbbing synthesizer sound, accompanied by some sort of painful, piercing wail, coming through the granite walls at the bottom of the shaft,' said Wilson Mining Works foreman George Connerly. 'So we turned off the turbine-powered pressure drills to get a better listen, and, sure enough, it was that Cher song.' The ubiquitous 'Believe' was also recently heard at the peak of Alaska's Mt. McKinley, in the farthest reaches of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, and in the middle of a swamp deep within the Florida Everglades."
📰 "'All or Nothing': In Cher's Case, It Would Be All"—BILLBOARD column by Michael Paoletta ("Dance Trax," Dec 25, 1999): "One year ago, we pondered the future of Cher's 'Believe.' Although the single was a No. 1 pop hit throughout much of Europe, we weren't quite sure if it would be able to repeat the process in the US. At the time, only club DJs and punters had embraced the song, resulting in a No. 1 smash on BILLBOARD's Hot Dance Club Play chart. We knew the song was still in its infancy, and with fingers crossed, we prayed that radio, as well as mainstream America, would open its ears. In two words: It did. In addition to topping the BILLBOARD Hot 100, 'Believe' spent 21 weeks atop the Hot Dance Maxi-Singles Sales chart, making it the longest-running No. 1 single in that chart's history. According to SoundScan, the single and album have sold 1.8m and 2.9m units, respectively. But the good news doesn't end there. With this issue, 'Believe,' the single, becomes the No. 1 song of 1999 on the Hot 100, Hot Dance Club Play, and Hot Dance Maxi-Singles Sales charts. Are we smiling? Try beaming!"
✍🏻 THE NEW ROLLING STONE ALBUM GUIDE retrospective review by Nathan Brackett and Christian David Hoard (2004): "In her 50s, Cher had done an iconistic variation on her iconhood. 'Believe,' her 1998 electronicized pop stroke, is a piece of music beloved by everyone from grocery-store moms to Damon Albarn of Blur, who pronounced it 'brilliant.'"
✍🏻 "The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born"—BLENDER restrospective review (Oct 2005): "Do you believe in life after Rob Camilletti? 25 years had passed since she'd last had a No. 1 hit [in the US], and Cher didn't think a heavily-vocoded disco anthem was the key to her comeback strategy. 'We argued the whole way through,' she said of the recording process. But 'Believe' was a monster, sculpted in the studio to dance-floor perfection and retaining Cher's signature woman-of-a-certain-age assuredness. It was an empowerment anthem only technology could have produced."
✍🏻 "A Powerhouse Renaissance for the Goddess of Pop"—SO SO GAY review of the album CLOSER TO THE TRUTH by Ed Brody (UK, Sept 23, 2013): "It's easy to forget what a monolithic megahit 'Believe' was in 1998, and easy to underestimate the effect it had on the pop scene. By placing a vocoder twang on Cher's eminently recognisable contralto, it instantly and entirely refreshed her sound and rejuvenated her standing amongst the nouveau-riche, melisma-mangling divas on the '90s pop charts. In the wake of 'Believe,' this souped-up Auto-Tune, which created the warbled vocoder effect, became broadly implemented across mainstream pop music."
✍🏻 FREAKY TRIGGER retrospective review by Tom Ewing (UK, July 24, 2014): "In an age of one-week wonders, 'Believe' was a phenomenon—a massive global hit, bossing the charts for close to two months. It has a formidable legacy: a triumphant capstone for Cher's career, setting the tone for a surge of dance-pop successes and opening the pop career of Brian Higgins and Xenomania, whose idiosyncratic approach would illuminate the early 2000s. Except none of that matters. The song's place in history has been filled by that unnatural bend in Cher's voice—the moment the public discovered Auto-Tune. So 'Believe' stops being a rather good pop song about rubbing your ex's face in their folly and instead becomes Patient Zero in an epidemic that defines or ruins modern pop. All debate and disdain over Auto-Tune start here, and all of it since lands back here. Cher, what have you done?
✍🏻 "Before talking about what 'Believe' does specifically, a couple of points. First, Auto-Tune is not a magic wand; it's a brand—a software package for pitch correction, like Hoover or Google—not the first, not the last, but the one whose fame hit at the right time. Second, 'Believe' isn't the first number-one record to use it. I don't know what is either. The point about Auto-Tune is that when you hear it like 'Believe' uses it, you're meant to hear it. Ordinarily, it should be invisible. 'Believe' is the sound of technology being abused, pushed beyond design. The standard debate around pitch correction—are singers deceiving the public?—is irrelevant to 'Believe.' It's like criticising THE MATRIX's bullet time for stunt-doubling. Technology taken beyond its limits just to see what happens—that's pop history. From amplification came distortion. From drum machines came acid house. And from pitch correction comes Cher's wonderful cyborg bravura. Once those limits were breached—to Cher's delight and her label's reported distress, at least until the money came in—anyone could jump beyond them.
✍🏻 "Back to 1998: most people thought the pitch-bending was a vocoder, and vocal distortion wasn't uncommon in 90s dance. Still, the way Cher used vocal tricks—mutating words—was startling and effective. If you've somehow missed 'Believe' in the last 15 years, you might be surprised how little Auto-Tune extremity there is—occasional verse words, with the chorus mostly pure Cher. The defiant belt-out is barely adulterated, just what even a technophobe fan might want. Would it have been a smash without Auto-Tune? Maybe not, but separating the two is foolish: if the trickery made 'Believe' a hit, the song's strength sustained it. The pitchbending suits Cher—her deep, showy vowels already verge on comic-book emphasis, so going over the top is perfect. It fits the song too: 'Believe' is an 'I Will Survive'-style anthem of embattled romantic defiance.
✍🏻 "The genius is how aggressive and righteous Cher makes it. There are records sung by divas, and there are records that need divas to sing them. This is the latter—without Cher's weight of performance and life experience behind it, the dread admonition of 'I really don't think you're strong enough' might fall flat. In this context—using strength to turn weakness into victory—what does Auto-Tune do? In 90s terms, before its familiar use cases, the effect seems like CGI for the voice: obviously artificial but thrilling, a liquefying and reforming of Cher's singing mid-word. Cher isn't just bouncing back from heartbreak, she's becoming something more than human to do it. No wonder everyone else wanted an upgrade. Score: 8/10."
✍🏻 "25 Greatest Pop Hooks of All Time"—BILLBOARD retrospective review (Nov 12, 2015): "Long before T-Pain and Future co-opted Auto-Tune, Cher was the first pop artist to employ the filter on her smash single 'Believe.' Without the effect, the hook is strong, but there's something about computerizing her vocals that adds a dimension to the chorus that still feels futuristic, years after its release."
✍🏻 "Cher Brings the Future of Pop with 'Believe'"—ROLLING STONE retrospective review by Christopher R. Weingarten (Oct 15, 2018): "This Friday, October 19th, marks the 20th anniversary of Cher's 'Believe,' the hit that predicted our future of techno-bubblegum and robo-warble. A massive success in 1998 and 1999, it introduced the world to Auto-Tune, the once-maligned, now-ubiquitous software that melts a singer's voice into uncanny perfection, forever changing pop music. With the pitch correction software less than two years old, producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling used it not to fix mistakes in Cher's iconic voice but as an aesthetic tool. 'Basically, it was the destruction of her voice, so I was really nervous about playing it to her!' Taylor told SOUND ON SOUND in 1999. However, don't take his quotes too seriously: he told the magazine it was actually a vocoder pedal to preserve their secret formula. 'She was fantastic—she just said, 'It sounds great!' so the effect stayed.' From there, the next 20 years would grow increasingly drenched in the stuff, fueling Daft Punk, T-Pain, Kanye West's 808S & HEARTBREAK, Future, Travis Scott, and Lil Uzi Vert. Swaths of contemporary African dance music—Algerian rai, Nigerian Afrobeats—are likewise soaked in Auto-Tune's signature gurgle."
✍🏻 PITCHFORK retrospective review by Allison Hussey (UK; Sept 27, 2022): "'Believe' marked a new era, for Cher and for popular music. For the first time on top 40 radio, Auto-Tune—producers' open-secret weapon for perfecting vocal takes—was laid bare for all to hear, on purpose, a reversal of its typical clandestine use. As she sings about trying to regain her footing after heartbreak, Cher's voice warbles with synthetic oscillation. Warner executives initially scoffed at the effect, but 'Believe' became one of Cher's biggest career hits ... Just as the song's production reveals the guts of its operation, Cher's wide-open vocals exposes her own emotional vulnerability. She isn't too good to admit she's not hurting, and she powers through toward salvation, declaring 'I don't need you anymore' as the song hits its peak. And coming from Cher—a confident, charismatic, and massively talented woman who'd been subjected to frequent public ridicule over her personal life—'Believe' took on an extra survivalist edge. Nearly 25 years later, it still dazzles in its defiance."
✍🏻 POPMATTERS retrospective review by Peter Piatkowski (Dec 7, 2022): "After the muted response to IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, she came back in 1998 with BELIEVE and its monster hit single, which reinvented Cher—yet again—this time as a robotic dance diva. Her throaty yodel was pinched, squeezed, and chopped with studio effects, rendering her almost unrecognizable on the song. The anonymity in 'Believe' is an unfortunate side effect of some of Cher's most successful hits. Anyone could have sung on that record. The massive success of that single and its parent album gave Cher a new career she held for the ensuing decades."
"Strong Enough" (1999)
🥇 HUN Airplay: #1 (3w)
🥇 SCA Airplay: #1 (3w)
🥇 HUN Sales: #1 (2w)
🥇 FIN Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥇 US Dance Club Play: #1 (1w)
🥇 UK Radio Adds: #1 (1w)
🥈 FIN: #2
🥈 BEL Sales: #2
🥈 EUR Airplay: #2
🥈 GSA Airplay: #2
🥈 FRA Airplay: #2
🥈 NLD Airplay: #2
🥈 POL Airplay: #2
🥉 EUR: #3
🥉 FRA: #3
🥉 GER: #3
🥉 ISL: #3
🥉 US Dance Sales: #3
🌟 AUT: #4
🌟 SCO: #4
🌟 SPA: #4
🌟 UK (GfK): #4
🌟 EUR Radio Adds: #4
🌟 UK (MTV): #4
🌟 DNK: #5
🌟 SWI: #5
🌟 UK (OCC): #5
🌟 ITA Airplay: #5
🌟 NZ: #6
🌟 GRC Sales: #6
🌟 UK Airplay: #6
🌟 FIN Sales: #7
🌟 EST Airplay: #8
🌟 CAN Quebec: #9
🌟 ITA: #10
🌟 LAT Airplay: #10
🚀 AUS: #11
🚀 IRE: #11
🚀 NLD: #11
🚀 CAN Dance: #12
🚀 CAN AC: #13
🚀 NOR: #16
🚀 CAN Sales: #16
🚀 SWE: #21
🚀 KAZ Airplay (2024): #29
🚀 US AC: #29
🚀 CAN: #30
🚀 US Airplay: #31
🪁 US: #57
💿 BEL (BRMA): Platinum
📀 UK (BPI): Gold
📀 AUS (ARIA): Gold
📀 FRA (SNEP): Gold
📀 GER (BVMI): Gold
🏅 THE MERCURY NEWS: "Top 25 Pride Anthems of All Time" (2020)
🏅 #72 on Radio Złote Przeboje's "Top 500," the biggest hits list in Poland (2025)
"Strong Enough" was Cher's answer to "I Will Survive" for the digital age. It traded heartbreak for resolve and disco nostalgia for the euphoria of survival, cementing her as a voice of endurance just a few months after "Believe" rewrote pop history.
📰 "Cher: Back to the Dance Floor!"—DANCE MUSIC AUTHORITY cover story by Johnny Danza and Dean Ferguson (Jan 1999): "The first song actually recorded for the [BELIEVE] album was 'Strong Enough,' and it is one of Cher's personal favorites. 'Rob told me that he said to the boys, "I'm gonna give you a chance to produce Cher. I want you to write a song for Cher. You know, a 'Cher' song,"' Cher says, 'and "Strong Enough" is the song they came up with.' That track has the kind of undeniably catchy retro-disco flavor that Cher herself favors when she goes out to a club. 'It's not that I think this is a '70s album, but there's a thread, a consistency running through it that I love. It's more obvious on certain tracks than it is on others, especially "Strong Enough."' She told us that Mark had tried approaching the track from several different, more contemporary angles before admitting, begrudgingly, that it worked best when they did it the way Cher suggested, meaning 'the way they did it in the old days.' That meant real strings and the dramatic a cappella-into-slam-dunk disco punch of classic hits like 'I Will Survive.' 'That was the only way to get into that song. The boys tried a whole bunch of different ways to do it [but] I told them it wasn't gonna work.' Cher says that they finally 'bit the bullet' and did it her way. The results speak for themselves, with 'Strong Enough' emerging as the near-universal choice for the next single release in Europe. Surprisingly, Cher said that a different track would probably be selected as the next American single. 'Music seems to be a little different over here, so I can't say for sure what the next [US] single might be.'"
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK review of the UK promo remixes by Chris Finan (UK, Feb 6, 1999): "It's always a tough job to follow the best-selling single of the previous year, but Cher sticks to her guns well here, employing mixes from Marc Andrews and D-Bop. The former is a take-no-risks follow-up, producing a competent song in a commercial club style that is sure to be the radio favourite. The D-Bop mix isn't a great deviation from the first version, although the vocal content is minimal and the production on the whole is nowhere near as harsh as previous D-Bop mixes, being somewhat more approachable. [3/5]"
📰 MUSIC & MEDIA column by Menno Visser ("On the Air"; Europe, Feb 13, 1999): "This week, the strongest impact on the European Radio Top 50 comes from follow-ups to last year's big hits, and many international artists make a showing in this week's airplay chart with two records. For instance, Cher, who is still at No. 5 this week with 'Believe,' while her new song, 'Strong Enough,' makes a powerful new entry—this week's highest—at No. 19. Scandinavia, where it is already No. 4, seems to have a specially strong belief in it. But elsewhere the song is also gaining converts. Oto Tache, programme director at Slovak AC station TOP Radio/Kosice, is programming it because: 'Personally, I think it has more emotion in it than the totally commercial "Believe."'"
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK single review (UK, Feb 13, 1999): "WEA faces a tough challenge following 'Believe,' now the biggest-selling single of all time in the UK by a female solo artist. Wisely, it opts for more of the same with another uptempo Eurodance cut from the album, though this lacks the vocoder vocal effect that made Believe stand out."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Feb 20, 1999): "Cher's 'Strong Enough' is the highest new entry to the airplay chart for more than a year. It debuts this week at No. 13."
📈 Chart note by James Masterton (UK, Mar 6, 1999): "Cher's performance of 'Believe' at the Brit Awards last month was probably the song's final burst in the UK, and she now moves on to the second single from her current album. 'Strong Enough' is a worthy successor to her record-breaking No. 1 hit. This time Cher goes disco and makes the kind of record she never really got round to recording in the 1970s. Essentially this is 'I Will Survive, Pt. II,' with a slow building start, swirling strings, and a joyful singalong chorus. For once a record this derivative does not suffer for it at all, and this is surely another potential classic in the making, even if it won't sell a million this time around."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Mar 13, 1999): "It's been a strong week for Cher. 'Strong Enough' has given her another hit in Germany. It debuts at No. 3 there this week, replacing her own 'Believe' as that territory's most successful UK-sourced hit."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Mar 13, 1999): "Cher's 'Strong Enough' climbs to No. 6 on the UK airplay chart this week. Radio Two still accounts for the largest share (25.5%) of its 55m audience, which is an historically high tally for a record in sixth place on the chart."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Mar 27, 1999): "Cher remains strong enough to hold off all challengers on the Top 20 chart of UK-sourced repertoire on the European airwaves. The BELIEVE album's second single holds for a second week at the top, while the 'Believe' track itself at No. 7 continues to give the artist two songs in the top 10."
✍🏻 BILLBOARD single review by Chuck Taylor (May 22, 1999): "The follow-up to the biggest hit in Cher's 32-year career picks up right where 'Believe' left off. The retro-disco 'Strong Enough' is irresistibly catchy, jubilant as a prayer revival, and an ideal partner as kids prepare to buddy up with radio as school finishes up. Everything about this anthemic track is obvious from the first listen: Cher is again in peak form, set in front of a string-laden, thump-happy beat that will have folks tapping toes and snapping fingers from Maine to Minnesota. Europe has already embraced this without a blink; any other outcome here would be lunacy. No doubt, this is the biggest no-brainer hit we've heard this year. From the deservedly double-platinum album BELIEVE."
📰 RADIO & RECORDS column by Reneé Bell ("On the Rise," Feb 1, 2002): "When I first learned that Cher was revisiting the US dance scene in '98 with 'Believe,' I nearly choked when I saw a picture of the star with the announcement of her return. 'Damn, she looks good!' was my immediate reaction, never mind how the track sounded. As you know, the track was good ... and so was 'Strong Enough,' the follow-up that branded the singer, in my book, a bonafide diva."
✍🏻 PHILADELPHIA review of the album CLOSER TO THE TRUTH by Michael Callahan (Sept 24, 2013): "'Dressed to Kill' should be the second single released, which only guarantees it won't be, just as Cher screwed up releasing the coyote-wailing that was 'Strong Enough' as the second single off of BELIEVE instead of the impossibly addictive 'Taxi Taxi.'"
📰 "Top 25 Pride Anthems of All Time"—THE MERCURY NEWS list by DJ Rotten Robbie (Jun 17, 2020): "This song is sung from the perspective of Cher to a cheating lover, but one could easily interpret the lyrics to be about a repressive society that she is no longer willing to tolerate. It's a song about finding one's strength and moving on."
🥇 SCA Airplay: #1 (3w)
🥇 HUN Sales: #1 (2w)
🥇 FIN Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥇 US Dance Club Play: #1 (1w)
🥇 UK Radio Adds: #1 (1w)
🥈 FIN: #2
🥈 BEL Sales: #2
🥈 EUR Airplay: #2
🥈 GSA Airplay: #2
🥈 FRA Airplay: #2
🥈 NLD Airplay: #2
🥈 POL Airplay: #2
🥉 EUR: #3
🥉 FRA: #3
🥉 GER: #3
🥉 ISL: #3
🥉 US Dance Sales: #3
🌟 AUT: #4
🌟 SCO: #4
🌟 SPA: #4
🌟 UK (GfK): #4
🌟 EUR Radio Adds: #4
🌟 UK (MTV): #4
🌟 DNK: #5
🌟 SWI: #5
🌟 UK (OCC): #5
🌟 ITA Airplay: #5
🌟 NZ: #6
🌟 GRC Sales: #6
🌟 UK Airplay: #6
🌟 FIN Sales: #7
🌟 EST Airplay: #8
🌟 CAN Quebec: #9
🌟 ITA: #10
🌟 LAT Airplay: #10
🚀 AUS: #11
🚀 IRE: #11
🚀 NLD: #11
🚀 CAN Dance: #12
🚀 CAN AC: #13
🚀 NOR: #16
🚀 CAN Sales: #16
🚀 SWE: #21
🚀 KAZ Airplay (2024): #29
🚀 US AC: #29
🚀 CAN: #30
🚀 US Airplay: #31
🪁 US: #57
💿 BEL (BRMA): Platinum
📀 UK (BPI): Gold
📀 AUS (ARIA): Gold
📀 FRA (SNEP): Gold
📀 GER (BVMI): Gold
🏅 THE MERCURY NEWS: "Top 25 Pride Anthems of All Time" (2020)
🏅 #72 on Radio Złote Przeboje's "Top 500," the biggest hits list in Poland (2025)
"Strong Enough" was Cher's answer to "I Will Survive" for the digital age. It traded heartbreak for resolve and disco nostalgia for the euphoria of survival, cementing her as a voice of endurance just a few months after "Believe" rewrote pop history.
📰 "Cher: Back to the Dance Floor!"—DANCE MUSIC AUTHORITY cover story by Johnny Danza and Dean Ferguson (Jan 1999): "The first song actually recorded for the [BELIEVE] album was 'Strong Enough,' and it is one of Cher's personal favorites. 'Rob told me that he said to the boys, "I'm gonna give you a chance to produce Cher. I want you to write a song for Cher. You know, a 'Cher' song,"' Cher says, 'and "Strong Enough" is the song they came up with.' That track has the kind of undeniably catchy retro-disco flavor that Cher herself favors when she goes out to a club. 'It's not that I think this is a '70s album, but there's a thread, a consistency running through it that I love. It's more obvious on certain tracks than it is on others, especially "Strong Enough."' She told us that Mark had tried approaching the track from several different, more contemporary angles before admitting, begrudgingly, that it worked best when they did it the way Cher suggested, meaning 'the way they did it in the old days.' That meant real strings and the dramatic a cappella-into-slam-dunk disco punch of classic hits like 'I Will Survive.' 'That was the only way to get into that song. The boys tried a whole bunch of different ways to do it [but] I told them it wasn't gonna work.' Cher says that they finally 'bit the bullet' and did it her way. The results speak for themselves, with 'Strong Enough' emerging as the near-universal choice for the next single release in Europe. Surprisingly, Cher said that a different track would probably be selected as the next American single. 'Music seems to be a little different over here, so I can't say for sure what the next [US] single might be.'"
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK review of the UK promo remixes by Chris Finan (UK, Feb 6, 1999): "It's always a tough job to follow the best-selling single of the previous year, but Cher sticks to her guns well here, employing mixes from Marc Andrews and D-Bop. The former is a take-no-risks follow-up, producing a competent song in a commercial club style that is sure to be the radio favourite. The D-Bop mix isn't a great deviation from the first version, although the vocal content is minimal and the production on the whole is nowhere near as harsh as previous D-Bop mixes, being somewhat more approachable. [3/5]"
📰 MUSIC & MEDIA column by Menno Visser ("On the Air"; Europe, Feb 13, 1999): "This week, the strongest impact on the European Radio Top 50 comes from follow-ups to last year's big hits, and many international artists make a showing in this week's airplay chart with two records. For instance, Cher, who is still at No. 5 this week with 'Believe,' while her new song, 'Strong Enough,' makes a powerful new entry—this week's highest—at No. 19. Scandinavia, where it is already No. 4, seems to have a specially strong belief in it. But elsewhere the song is also gaining converts. Oto Tache, programme director at Slovak AC station TOP Radio/Kosice, is programming it because: 'Personally, I think it has more emotion in it than the totally commercial "Believe."'"
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK single review (UK, Feb 13, 1999): "WEA faces a tough challenge following 'Believe,' now the biggest-selling single of all time in the UK by a female solo artist. Wisely, it opts for more of the same with another uptempo Eurodance cut from the album, though this lacks the vocoder vocal effect that made Believe stand out."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Feb 20, 1999): "Cher's 'Strong Enough' is the highest new entry to the airplay chart for more than a year. It debuts this week at No. 13."
📈 Chart note by James Masterton (UK, Mar 6, 1999): "Cher's performance of 'Believe' at the Brit Awards last month was probably the song's final burst in the UK, and she now moves on to the second single from her current album. 'Strong Enough' is a worthy successor to her record-breaking No. 1 hit. This time Cher goes disco and makes the kind of record she never really got round to recording in the 1970s. Essentially this is 'I Will Survive, Pt. II,' with a slow building start, swirling strings, and a joyful singalong chorus. For once a record this derivative does not suffer for it at all, and this is surely another potential classic in the making, even if it won't sell a million this time around."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Mar 13, 1999): "It's been a strong week for Cher. 'Strong Enough' has given her another hit in Germany. It debuts at No. 3 there this week, replacing her own 'Believe' as that territory's most successful UK-sourced hit."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Mar 13, 1999): "Cher's 'Strong Enough' climbs to No. 6 on the UK airplay chart this week. Radio Two still accounts for the largest share (25.5%) of its 55m audience, which is an historically high tally for a record in sixth place on the chart."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Mar 27, 1999): "Cher remains strong enough to hold off all challengers on the Top 20 chart of UK-sourced repertoire on the European airwaves. The BELIEVE album's second single holds for a second week at the top, while the 'Believe' track itself at No. 7 continues to give the artist two songs in the top 10."
✍🏻 BILLBOARD single review by Chuck Taylor (May 22, 1999): "The follow-up to the biggest hit in Cher's 32-year career picks up right where 'Believe' left off. The retro-disco 'Strong Enough' is irresistibly catchy, jubilant as a prayer revival, and an ideal partner as kids prepare to buddy up with radio as school finishes up. Everything about this anthemic track is obvious from the first listen: Cher is again in peak form, set in front of a string-laden, thump-happy beat that will have folks tapping toes and snapping fingers from Maine to Minnesota. Europe has already embraced this without a blink; any other outcome here would be lunacy. No doubt, this is the biggest no-brainer hit we've heard this year. From the deservedly double-platinum album BELIEVE."
📰 RADIO & RECORDS column by Reneé Bell ("On the Rise," Feb 1, 2002): "When I first learned that Cher was revisiting the US dance scene in '98 with 'Believe,' I nearly choked when I saw a picture of the star with the announcement of her return. 'Damn, she looks good!' was my immediate reaction, never mind how the track sounded. As you know, the track was good ... and so was 'Strong Enough,' the follow-up that branded the singer, in my book, a bonafide diva."
✍🏻 PHILADELPHIA review of the album CLOSER TO THE TRUTH by Michael Callahan (Sept 24, 2013): "'Dressed to Kill' should be the second single released, which only guarantees it won't be, just as Cher screwed up releasing the coyote-wailing that was 'Strong Enough' as the second single off of BELIEVE instead of the impossibly addictive 'Taxi Taxi.'"
📰 "Top 25 Pride Anthems of All Time"—THE MERCURY NEWS list by DJ Rotten Robbie (Jun 17, 2020): "This song is sung from the perspective of Cher to a cheating lover, but one could easily interpret the lyrics to be about a repressive society that she is no longer willing to tolerate. It's a song about finding one's strength and moving on."
"All or Nothing" (1999)
🥇 US Dance Club Play: #1 (1w)
🥈 US Dance Sales: #2 (with "Dov'è l'amore")
🥉 EUR Radio Adds: #3
🌟 FIN: #4
🌟 HUN Sales: #5
🌟 SCA Airplay: #6
🌟 CZE Airplay: #8
🌟 GSA Airplay: #8
🌟 EUR Airplay: #9
🌟 SCO: #10
🚀 UK: #12
🚀 DNK: #14
🚀 LAT Airplay: #18
🚀 ITA Airplay: #19
🚀 SPA Airplay: #19
🚀 FRA Airplay: #25
🚀 IRE: #26
🚀 BEL Flanders: #28
🚀 BEL Wallonia: #28
🚀 NZ: #28
🚀 FRA: #30
🚀 SWI: #30
🚀 AUT: #38
🚀 US Sales: #38
🚀 EUR: #39
🚀 UK Airplay: #40
🪁 GER: #44
🪁 NLD: #54
🪁 SWE: #58
🪁 AUS: #62
🏅 #28 on Radio Złote Przeboje's "Top 500," the biggest hits list in Poland (2025)
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK review (UK, May 22, 1999): "The combination of one of the most immediately recognisable voices in pop and the same production team that created the smash 'Believe,' should deliver Cher her third top-10 hit from the platinum-selling BELIEVE album."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK,Jun 19, 1999): "'All or Nothing' is the third consecutive major sales hit from Cher's BELIEVE album. It debuts at No. 12 [in the UK] this week, following the No. 1 success of the title track, and the No. 5 hit 'Strong Enough.' But while those two records were championed by radio—'Believe' matching its No. 1 sales peak [on the UK airplay chart] and 'Strong Enough' reaching No. 6—'All or Nothing' has had a very lukewarm reaction from programmers. After weeks of struggling, it finally sneaks into the top 50 this week, moving from No. 54 to No. 48."
📈 Chart note by James Masterton (UK, Jun 19, 1999): "The law of diminishing returns means that after the million-selling No. 1 'Believe' and its top-five follow-up 'Strong Enough,' Cher's third single from her current album can only land on the cusp of the top 10. 'All or Nothing' is more downtempo, but it still has a thumping Euro-disco beat that is far removed from her days as a leather-clad rock singer in the late 1980s. She can be forgiven for feeling frustrated that this single did not chart a little higher. Another two places and it would have marked the first time that she had charted with three successive top-10 hits [in the UK]."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Jun 26, 1999): "Cher's record-breaking 'Believe' finally drops out of FONO's top 20 countdown of the biggest UK-sourced hits on European radio, only to be replaced by another single from the veteran singer. 'All or Nothing' is the highest new entry to the chart at No. 16, while 'Strong Enough' sits at No. 10."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Aug 7, 1999): "Cher, who has already had two top-10 hits in France this year with 'Believe' and 'Strong Enough,' is looking a pretty good bet to turn that into a hat-trick of French successes. 'All or Nothing,' the third single from the album BELIEVE, is the highest top-40 entry this week in France, where it debuts at No. 30."
✍🏻 BILLBOARD review by Chuck Taylor (Sept 25, 1999): "With Cher raging through one of the hottest tours of the summer and having created a TV spectacle with her hot HBO concert special a couple of weeks ago, the timing couldn't be better for the third single from her triple-platinum BELIEVE. This song leans closer to the pop side, like the No. 1 'Believe,' but is still the kind of pure dance extravaganza that brings nothing but exalted exuberance to the radio airwaves. There's no explanation why previous release 'Strong Enough' failed to catch at radio, so here's a chance to make up for that misstep with a song that is so joyous and well-executed that it makes life a little more satisfying than it was four minutes before. Dance clubs have already taken this cut to the top five of the Hot Dance Club Play chart; the exceptional Metro Radio mix should provide equal acceptance at top 40 radio. Truly wondrous."
📰 BILLBOARD report (Oct 23, 1999): "At the Adult Contemporary panels of the 1999 BILLBOARD/AIRPLAY MONITOR Radio Seminar in Miami Beach, WTMX Chicago program director Barry James said that stations now view themselves as 'far more song-driven than music-driven. We have no core artists, which can drive the labels crazy when they bring us an artist's third single [and expect airplay].' Then there's the inverse problem. WLTW New York program director Jim Ryan criticized labels for pigeonholing his station, citing an instance when a label wouldn't service him with Cher's new single, 'All or Nothing,' because it wasn't promoting the single to Adult Contemporary stations."
🥈 US Dance Sales: #2 (with "Dov'è l'amore")
🥉 EUR Radio Adds: #3
🌟 FIN: #4
🌟 HUN Sales: #5
🌟 SCA Airplay: #6
🌟 CZE Airplay: #8
🌟 GSA Airplay: #8
🌟 EUR Airplay: #9
🌟 SCO: #10
🚀 UK: #12
🚀 DNK: #14
🚀 LAT Airplay: #18
🚀 ITA Airplay: #19
🚀 SPA Airplay: #19
🚀 FRA Airplay: #25
🚀 IRE: #26
🚀 BEL Flanders: #28
🚀 BEL Wallonia: #28
🚀 NZ: #28
🚀 FRA: #30
🚀 SWI: #30
🚀 AUT: #38
🚀 US Sales: #38
🚀 EUR: #39
🚀 UK Airplay: #40
🪁 GER: #44
🪁 NLD: #54
🪁 SWE: #58
🪁 AUS: #62
🏅 #28 on Radio Złote Przeboje's "Top 500," the biggest hits list in Poland (2025)
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK review (UK, May 22, 1999): "The combination of one of the most immediately recognisable voices in pop and the same production team that created the smash 'Believe,' should deliver Cher her third top-10 hit from the platinum-selling BELIEVE album."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK,Jun 19, 1999): "'All or Nothing' is the third consecutive major sales hit from Cher's BELIEVE album. It debuts at No. 12 [in the UK] this week, following the No. 1 success of the title track, and the No. 5 hit 'Strong Enough.' But while those two records were championed by radio—'Believe' matching its No. 1 sales peak [on the UK airplay chart] and 'Strong Enough' reaching No. 6—'All or Nothing' has had a very lukewarm reaction from programmers. After weeks of struggling, it finally sneaks into the top 50 this week, moving from No. 54 to No. 48."
📈 Chart note by James Masterton (UK, Jun 19, 1999): "The law of diminishing returns means that after the million-selling No. 1 'Believe' and its top-five follow-up 'Strong Enough,' Cher's third single from her current album can only land on the cusp of the top 10. 'All or Nothing' is more downtempo, but it still has a thumping Euro-disco beat that is far removed from her days as a leather-clad rock singer in the late 1980s. She can be forgiven for feeling frustrated that this single did not chart a little higher. Another two places and it would have marked the first time that she had charted with three successive top-10 hits [in the UK]."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Jun 26, 1999): "Cher's record-breaking 'Believe' finally drops out of FONO's top 20 countdown of the biggest UK-sourced hits on European radio, only to be replaced by another single from the veteran singer. 'All or Nothing' is the highest new entry to the chart at No. 16, while 'Strong Enough' sits at No. 10."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Aug 7, 1999): "Cher, who has already had two top-10 hits in France this year with 'Believe' and 'Strong Enough,' is looking a pretty good bet to turn that into a hat-trick of French successes. 'All or Nothing,' the third single from the album BELIEVE, is the highest top-40 entry this week in France, where it debuts at No. 30."
✍🏻 BILLBOARD review by Chuck Taylor (Sept 25, 1999): "With Cher raging through one of the hottest tours of the summer and having created a TV spectacle with her hot HBO concert special a couple of weeks ago, the timing couldn't be better for the third single from her triple-platinum BELIEVE. This song leans closer to the pop side, like the No. 1 'Believe,' but is still the kind of pure dance extravaganza that brings nothing but exalted exuberance to the radio airwaves. There's no explanation why previous release 'Strong Enough' failed to catch at radio, so here's a chance to make up for that misstep with a song that is so joyous and well-executed that it makes life a little more satisfying than it was four minutes before. Dance clubs have already taken this cut to the top five of the Hot Dance Club Play chart; the exceptional Metro Radio mix should provide equal acceptance at top 40 radio. Truly wondrous."
📰 BILLBOARD report (Oct 23, 1999): "At the Adult Contemporary panels of the 1999 BILLBOARD/AIRPLAY MONITOR Radio Seminar in Miami Beach, WTMX Chicago program director Barry James said that stations now view themselves as 'far more song-driven than music-driven. We have no core artists, which can drive the labels crazy when they bring us an artist's third single [and expect airplay].' Then there's the inverse problem. WLTW New York program director Jim Ryan criticized labels for pigeonholing his station, citing an instance when a label wouldn't service him with Cher's new single, 'All or Nothing,' because it wasn't promoting the single to Adult Contemporary stations."
"Dovè l'amore" (1999)
💡 Originally from the album BELIEVE
💡 Remix by Emilio Estefan released as a single in October 1999
💡 Only single from THE GREATEST HITS (1999), where the remixed single version appears as the compilation's closing track
📍 Not released in the US
🥇 FIN: #1 (5w)
🥇 FIN Airplay: #1 (4w)
🥇 HUN Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥈 US Dance Sales: #2 (with "All or Nothing")
🌟 SPA: #4
🌟 EST Airplay: #4
🌟 FIN Sales: #5
🌟 US Dance Club Play: #5
🌟 GRC Sales: #7
🌟 ITA: #8
🌟 CZE Airplay: #8
🌟 POL Airplay: #8
🌟 EUR Radio Adds: #9
🌟 HUN Sales: #10
🚀 BEL Wallonia: #14
🚀 LAT Airplay: #14
🚀 EUR Airplay: #15
🚀 SCO: #16
🚀 SWI: #18
🚀 SCA Airplay: #20
🚀 UK: #21
🚀 EUR: #30
🚀 GER: #31
🚀 UK Club: #34
🚀 BEL Flanders: #36
🚀 SWE: #37
🚀 AUT: #38
🚀 CAN Quebec: #39
🪁 NLD: #44
🪁 FRA: #46
🪁 AUS: #49
🔎 THE CFC BREAKDOWN: "Dov'è l'amore" is often remembered as BELIEVE's fourth and final single—except, technically, it wasn't. Its story doesn't follow the neat arc of an official campaign; it unspools like a pop-culture cautionary tale that begins the very day after BELIEVE hit shelves.
On October 23, 1998, during rehearsals for the 4th VH1 Fashion Awards, Madonna was overheard absent-mindedly singing the chorus to "Dov'è l'amore" between takes (the footage survives on CherFlix), and the moment detonated among fans. The album had been out for barely 24 hours, but clearly Madonna had already played it and gotten the song lodged in her head. The fantasy took over immediately: had she rushed to buy BELIEVE on release day? Was she secretly a Cher devotee? The possibilities were too delicious to resist.
The truth is more mundane, and arguably more revealing. Cher and Madonna shared both a publicist (Liz Rosenberg) and a label (Warner) at the time, so their musical worlds regularly cross-pollinated. Whether Madonna genuinely loved the track, sensed a competitive threat, or simply wanted in on the moment, we'll never know. But what we do know is that she went to bat for "Dov'è l'amore" inside Warner, lobbying for it to be BELIEVE's lead single. She even floated the idea of directing the music video herself—on the condition, of course, that it be the campaign opener. It wasn't.
By January 1999, "Believe" had become a global supernova, topping charts across continents for months and showing no signs of slowing down. When ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT asked Madonna whether her offer to direct Cher's video still stood, she brushed it away: "When I first heard it, I was like, 'Oh my God, this has to be the first single! I'm directing the video!' Of course I don't have the time to do that, but I liked saying it at the time. It sounded right." The fan theory that emerged was deliciously cynical: Madonna had allegedly clocked "Believe" as the supernova and pushed for another track to be promoted first, ensuring Cher's actual weapon wouldn't get the full machinery of a lead single launch. Jamie O'Connor ultimately took the director's chair Madonna had only passed by, assuming she was ever seriously considered.
Cher shot the entire "Dov'è l'amore" video to the album version. It played on loop while she mimed, the timing and choreography built around that track, long before the label swapped it for the faster, louder, shorter Emilio Estefan remix. O'Connor had planned a loose storyline involving a love triangle with a flamenco dancer, a shirtless romantic lead, and a melodramatic villain, the whole thing barreling toward a wedding finale. The remix upended that. Warner carved the footage into one-second flashes for broadcast, scrambling the narrative until there wasn't one.
What aired was no longer a mini-telenovela but a rapid-fire collage, a cross-continental fever dream that weaves Spanish flamenco shapes, Mexican altar iconography—complete with a Chihuahua planted on Cher's lap in case the point needed underlining—Argentine accordion shadows, Brazilian carnival sparkle, Venezuelan telenovela melodrama, Andalusian torero flourishes, and Italian lyrics, with Cher in full Latina drag at the center of it all. None of the references are held long enough to settle into authenticity. The result is a maximalist chimera whose coherence comes solely from Cher's gravitational field, pulling every visual element into orbit around her. It is cultural syncretism as pop spectacle: excessive, committed, and delivered with the breezy self-awareness of someone who knows exactly how ridiculous this is and does not care.
The remix itself landed as the closing track on the European compilation THE GREATEST HITS (1999), and promotion for the single and the compilation ran side by side, with the single arriving two weeks ahead of the album to build momentum. Like everything Cher touched at the dawn of the new millennium, THE GREATEST HITS turned into a sales phenomenon, topping the composite European Top 100 Albums chart. Cher performed the remix live only once, on the UK's NATIONAL LOTTERY SHOW.
The single fared respectably for what it was, a would-be juggernaut that arrived only months after the Latin-pop boom peaked with "Livin' la Vida Loca." Had it come out in its original form as the follow-up to "Believe" in early 1999, nothing would have stopped it from becoming the Latin-pop smash of the year. By late 1999, though, it played like a cash-in, a mimicry of the sound Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias were riding to global saturation, even though Cher's recording predated both. Still, it topped the charts in Finland for five weeks, hit No. 1 in Hungary, and reached the top 10 in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Spain.
📰 "Cher: Back to the Dance Floor!"—DANCE MUSIC AUTHORITY cover story by Johnny Danza and Dean Ferguson (Jan 1999): "With 'Strong Enough' already locked up as the next UK single, we asked what she thought the next American single might be. Cher said that it might be 'Dov'è l'amore.' Interestingly, 'Dov'è l'amore' is a Spanish song with Italian lyrics, and we asked Cher how that came to be. 'When the boys wrote "Dov'è," there was an Italian restaurant next door—there weren't any Spanish restaurants around—and they just kept running to the guy in the restaurant who spoke Italian and said "tell me how to say this," and "how do you say that?," and that's how they wrote it.' She laughs, continuing. 'And I love the Gipsy Kings, so we got one of the Gipsy Kings to do the guitar work.' We then asked if what we'd heard about Madonna's fondness for the track was true. 'When Madonna heard the song, she called Liz [Rosenberg, of Warner Brothers US], and then Liz called me. She said that Madonna insisted that "Dov'è" had to be the next single and that, if it was, she wanted to direct the video.'"
✍🏻 DOTMUSIC review by Sarah Davis (UK, Oct 14, 1999): "Is the world up for more Latino-inspired records after this summer's hits from Ricky Martin, Geri Halliwell, and Lou Bega? Apparently Cher thinks so. She's gone Latin on the lyrics and sploshed Spanish guitar over dance beats to create a song uncannily like the Spice Girls' 'Viva Forever,' from their first post-Geri album. Needless to say, it's catchy: written by the team behind 'Believe' and produced by Gloria Estefan's husband Emilio Estefan Jnr., who handled Ricky Martin's 'She's All I Ever Had.' Skilful writing and slick production on vocal effects and vibrant beats give the song its own appeal."
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK review (UK, Oct 16, 1999): "Written and produced by the Metro team, who also produced and wrote 'Believe,' this sees Cher joining Geri Halliwell and Madonna in comfortable Latin territory. Will adequately promote her forthcoming best-of."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Oct 23, 1999): "Cher's 'Dov'è l'amore' had a terrific first week on the UK Club Pop chart and debuts at No. 2. Two different 12-inches are around, but it is the second, featuring Todd Terry and Tony Moran mixes, that is doing the dancefloor damage."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Oct 30, 1999): "'All or Nothing' may have disappeared from the listings, but the arrival this week of 'Dov'è l'amore' ensures Cher keeps her record of having a presence on FONO's Top 20 chart for the biggest UK-sourced hits on European radio every week this year."
📈 Chart note by James Masterton (UK, Nov 6, 1999): "It has been 53 weeks since 'Believe' first exploded onto the chart and gave Cher's career an enormous shot in the arm, and she charts once more with the fourth single from the album. 'Dov'è l'amore' is an enormously camp piece of flamenco-driven Latin pop that unfortunately seems to have been released two months too late. Just imagine this single blaring out of radios at the height of summer—it would have worked perfectly, wouldn't it? Even so, the law of diminishing returns may not have helped the single's chart position much, and No. 21 is probably as good as she could have hoped for."
💡 Remix by Emilio Estefan released as a single in October 1999
💡 Only single from THE GREATEST HITS (1999), where the remixed single version appears as the compilation's closing track
📍 Not released in the US
🥇 FIN: #1 (5w)
🥇 FIN Airplay: #1 (4w)
🥇 HUN Airplay: #1 (1w)
🥈 US Dance Sales: #2 (with "All or Nothing")
🌟 SPA: #4
🌟 EST Airplay: #4
🌟 FIN Sales: #5
🌟 US Dance Club Play: #5
🌟 GRC Sales: #7
🌟 ITA: #8
🌟 CZE Airplay: #8
🌟 POL Airplay: #8
🌟 EUR Radio Adds: #9
🌟 HUN Sales: #10
🚀 BEL Wallonia: #14
🚀 LAT Airplay: #14
🚀 EUR Airplay: #15
🚀 SCO: #16
🚀 SWI: #18
🚀 SCA Airplay: #20
🚀 UK: #21
🚀 EUR: #30
🚀 GER: #31
🚀 UK Club: #34
🚀 BEL Flanders: #36
🚀 SWE: #37
🚀 AUT: #38
🚀 CAN Quebec: #39
🪁 NLD: #44
🪁 FRA: #46
🪁 AUS: #49
🔎 THE CFC BREAKDOWN: "Dov'è l'amore" is often remembered as BELIEVE's fourth and final single—except, technically, it wasn't. Its story doesn't follow the neat arc of an official campaign; it unspools like a pop-culture cautionary tale that begins the very day after BELIEVE hit shelves.
On October 23, 1998, during rehearsals for the 4th VH1 Fashion Awards, Madonna was overheard absent-mindedly singing the chorus to "Dov'è l'amore" between takes (the footage survives on CherFlix), and the moment detonated among fans. The album had been out for barely 24 hours, but clearly Madonna had already played it and gotten the song lodged in her head. The fantasy took over immediately: had she rushed to buy BELIEVE on release day? Was she secretly a Cher devotee? The possibilities were too delicious to resist.
The truth is more mundane, and arguably more revealing. Cher and Madonna shared both a publicist (Liz Rosenberg) and a label (Warner) at the time, so their musical worlds regularly cross-pollinated. Whether Madonna genuinely loved the track, sensed a competitive threat, or simply wanted in on the moment, we'll never know. But what we do know is that she went to bat for "Dov'è l'amore" inside Warner, lobbying for it to be BELIEVE's lead single. She even floated the idea of directing the music video herself—on the condition, of course, that it be the campaign opener. It wasn't.
By January 1999, "Believe" had become a global supernova, topping charts across continents for months and showing no signs of slowing down. When ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT asked Madonna whether her offer to direct Cher's video still stood, she brushed it away: "When I first heard it, I was like, 'Oh my God, this has to be the first single! I'm directing the video!' Of course I don't have the time to do that, but I liked saying it at the time. It sounded right." The fan theory that emerged was deliciously cynical: Madonna had allegedly clocked "Believe" as the supernova and pushed for another track to be promoted first, ensuring Cher's actual weapon wouldn't get the full machinery of a lead single launch. Jamie O'Connor ultimately took the director's chair Madonna had only passed by, assuming she was ever seriously considered.
Cher shot the entire "Dov'è l'amore" video to the album version. It played on loop while she mimed, the timing and choreography built around that track, long before the label swapped it for the faster, louder, shorter Emilio Estefan remix. O'Connor had planned a loose storyline involving a love triangle with a flamenco dancer, a shirtless romantic lead, and a melodramatic villain, the whole thing barreling toward a wedding finale. The remix upended that. Warner carved the footage into one-second flashes for broadcast, scrambling the narrative until there wasn't one.
What aired was no longer a mini-telenovela but a rapid-fire collage, a cross-continental fever dream that weaves Spanish flamenco shapes, Mexican altar iconography—complete with a Chihuahua planted on Cher's lap in case the point needed underlining—Argentine accordion shadows, Brazilian carnival sparkle, Venezuelan telenovela melodrama, Andalusian torero flourishes, and Italian lyrics, with Cher in full Latina drag at the center of it all. None of the references are held long enough to settle into authenticity. The result is a maximalist chimera whose coherence comes solely from Cher's gravitational field, pulling every visual element into orbit around her. It is cultural syncretism as pop spectacle: excessive, committed, and delivered with the breezy self-awareness of someone who knows exactly how ridiculous this is and does not care.
The remix itself landed as the closing track on the European compilation THE GREATEST HITS (1999), and promotion for the single and the compilation ran side by side, with the single arriving two weeks ahead of the album to build momentum. Like everything Cher touched at the dawn of the new millennium, THE GREATEST HITS turned into a sales phenomenon, topping the composite European Top 100 Albums chart. Cher performed the remix live only once, on the UK's NATIONAL LOTTERY SHOW.
The single fared respectably for what it was, a would-be juggernaut that arrived only months after the Latin-pop boom peaked with "Livin' la Vida Loca." Had it come out in its original form as the follow-up to "Believe" in early 1999, nothing would have stopped it from becoming the Latin-pop smash of the year. By late 1999, though, it played like a cash-in, a mimicry of the sound Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias were riding to global saturation, even though Cher's recording predated both. Still, it topped the charts in Finland for five weeks, hit No. 1 in Hungary, and reached the top 10 in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Spain.
📰 "Cher: Back to the Dance Floor!"—DANCE MUSIC AUTHORITY cover story by Johnny Danza and Dean Ferguson (Jan 1999): "With 'Strong Enough' already locked up as the next UK single, we asked what she thought the next American single might be. Cher said that it might be 'Dov'è l'amore.' Interestingly, 'Dov'è l'amore' is a Spanish song with Italian lyrics, and we asked Cher how that came to be. 'When the boys wrote "Dov'è," there was an Italian restaurant next door—there weren't any Spanish restaurants around—and they just kept running to the guy in the restaurant who spoke Italian and said "tell me how to say this," and "how do you say that?," and that's how they wrote it.' She laughs, continuing. 'And I love the Gipsy Kings, so we got one of the Gipsy Kings to do the guitar work.' We then asked if what we'd heard about Madonna's fondness for the track was true. 'When Madonna heard the song, she called Liz [Rosenberg, of Warner Brothers US], and then Liz called me. She said that Madonna insisted that "Dov'è" had to be the next single and that, if it was, she wanted to direct the video.'"
✍🏻 DOTMUSIC review by Sarah Davis (UK, Oct 14, 1999): "Is the world up for more Latino-inspired records after this summer's hits from Ricky Martin, Geri Halliwell, and Lou Bega? Apparently Cher thinks so. She's gone Latin on the lyrics and sploshed Spanish guitar over dance beats to create a song uncannily like the Spice Girls' 'Viva Forever,' from their first post-Geri album. Needless to say, it's catchy: written by the team behind 'Believe' and produced by Gloria Estefan's husband Emilio Estefan Jnr., who handled Ricky Martin's 'She's All I Ever Had.' Skilful writing and slick production on vocal effects and vibrant beats give the song its own appeal."
✍🏻 MUSIC WEEK review (UK, Oct 16, 1999): "Written and produced by the Metro team, who also produced and wrote 'Believe,' this sees Cher joining Geri Halliwell and Madonna in comfortable Latin territory. Will adequately promote her forthcoming best-of."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Alan Jones ("Chart Commentary"; UK, Oct 23, 1999): "Cher's 'Dov'è l'amore' had a terrific first week on the UK Club Pop chart and debuts at No. 2. Two different 12-inches are around, but it is the second, featuring Todd Terry and Tony Moran mixes, that is doing the dancefloor damage."
📰 MUSIC WEEK column by Paul Williams ("Chart File"; UK, Oct 30, 1999): "'All or Nothing' may have disappeared from the listings, but the arrival this week of 'Dov'è l'amore' ensures Cher keeps her record of having a presence on FONO's Top 20 chart for the biggest UK-sourced hits on European radio every week this year."
📈 Chart note by James Masterton (UK, Nov 6, 1999): "It has been 53 weeks since 'Believe' first exploded onto the chart and gave Cher's career an enormous shot in the arm, and she charts once more with the fourth single from the album. 'Dov'è l'amore' is an enormously camp piece of flamenco-driven Latin pop that unfortunately seems to have been released two months too late. Just imagine this single blaring out of radios at the height of summer—it would have worked perfectly, wouldn't it? Even so, the law of diminishing returns may not have helped the single's chart position much, and No. 21 is probably as good as she could have hoped for."
Videos
“Believe (Rough Cut)”
"Believe"
"Strong Enough"
"All or Nothing"
"Dov'è L'amore"
“Dov’è L’amore (Emilio Estefan Jr. Mix)”
"Believe" (National Lottery)
"Believe" (Top of the Pops #1)
"Believe" (Top of the Pops #2)
"All or Nothing" (Believe Tour)
"All or Nothing" (Top of the Pops)
"Believe" (American Music Awards)
"Believe" (Believe Tour)
"Believe" (Kultnacht)
"Believe" (Letterman)
"Dov'è L'amore" (Believe Tour)
"Dov'è L'amore" (National Lottery)
"Strong Enough" (Believe Tour)
"Strong Enough" (Kultnacht)
"Strong Enough" (Top of the Pops)
"The Power" (Believe Tour)
"Believe" (VH1 Divas Las Vegas)
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