Songfacts®:

• Many great songs were written and recorded very quickly in short bursts of inspiration. This wasn't one of them. About six years in the making, "Believe" was the result of the painstaking efforts of six songwriters and at least three producers attempting to create a massive hit for Cher.
  
  The song began life as a demo created by four songwriters at Cher's record label, Warner Brothers. From there, it went to some top producers, including Nick Van Eede of Cutting Crew, who said in his Songfacts interview: "Kevin MacMichael and I produced the original demo with Mark Scott and Brian Higgins in 1992 I think. That shows how long the song sat around. We tweaked the melody and chords in the famous chorus... listen to the first two chords to 'I've Been in Love Before' and the first two chords to 'Believe' and you'll hear the similarity. We got paid a bottle of whisky between us for the session!"
  
  The song eventually made its way to Metro Productions, which is a small studio in London, where Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling worked on the track after two Metro songwriters reworked it a bit (bringing the songwriter tally to six). They used a variety of studio techniques and processors to create a very synthesized sound, trying to create an original dance track that wouldn't alienate Cher's core audience that was used to her rock ballads. In an interview with Sound On Sound magazine, Mark Taylor explained that he ended up producing the song twice: "It was just too hardcore dance - it wasn't happening. I scrapped it and started again, because I realized it needed a sound that was unusual, but not in a typical dance record sort of way. This was tricky, because dance music is very specific. To get what I was after I had to think about each sound very carefully, so that the sound itself was dance-based but not obviously so."
  
  The big breakthrough in the production of this song was the distinctive vocal effect, which the producers claimed was done using a vocoder device. It was later revealed that they used an Auto-Tune processor, which is a device created by Antares Audio Technologies to correct the pitch in recorded vocals.
  
  Vocoders had been used in music since the '70s to synthesize voices, creating a robotic effect. Auto-Tune came on the market in 1997, and producers quickly realized that putting it on an extreme setting would create a heavily distorted vocal. That's not what the software was made for, but it created a vocoder-like sound that kept some of the actual vocal, making it sound less computerized. Cher's team had reason to deny they were using Auto-Tune: the general public didn't know that musicians were now having their vocals corrected so their pitch was always perfect. "Believe" pulled back the curtain on this studio technique.
• "Believe" was a massive hit in the UK before it was even released in America. In the UK, the single was released on October 19, 1998; it debuted at #1 on Halloween and spent seven weeks on top, becoming the biggest UK hit by a solo female artist, selling about 1.7 million copies.
  
  In America, it was a slow build; released as a single on November 10, the song first charted (at #99) on December 19, 1998 and climbed to #1 on March 13, 1999, where it stayed for four weeks. In the UK, it was the biggest-selling single of 1998; in America, it was the biggest-selling single of 1999.
• Thanks to this song, intentionally distorted Auto-Tuned vocals became known as the "Cher effect." Kid Rock actually beat her to it, using Auto-Tune in this manner on his song "Only God Knows Why," released a few months earlier. In 1999, Eiffel 65 had a huge hit with "Blue (Da Ba Dee)," but that one likely used a harmonizer. The rapper/producers Kanye West and T-Pain were the ones who refined and popularized Auto-Tune as an effect with their '00s output.
• This was a big comeback song for Cher, who was one of the biggest stars of the '60s and '70s. She revived her music career in 1989 with the MTV hits "If I Could Turn Back Time" and "Just Like Jesse James," then came storming back in 1998 with "Believe." In the '80s, she was also one of the most successful actresses in the game, winning an Oscar in 1998 for Moonstruck.
• When this hit #1 in the US, it marked the longest period between Hot 100 chart-toppers for any act. Cher's last #1 on the chart was "Dark Lady" in 1974. At 25 years, this broke the record previously held by The Beach Boys, who went 22 years between "Good Vibrations" and "Kokomo."
  
  Cher's record was broken by Brenda Lee in 2023 when she topped the charts with "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" in 2023. Lee's previous #1 hit was "I Want to Be Wanted" in 1960, 63 years earlier.
• Cher was 52 when "Believe" topped the charts in the UK and US, making her the oldest female artist to have a #1 hit in both territories. When Cher broke the record Louis Armstrong was the most senior singer to top both charts; in America he hit #1 with "Hello, Dolly!" in 1964 when he was 62; in Britain, he was 66 when "What A Wonderful World" went to #1 in 1968.
  
  Kate Bush took Cher's UK record in June 2022. When "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" climbed to the summit, the English singer was 63 years and 11 months.
  
  Brenda Lee took Cher's US record in December 2023. When "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" ascended to #1 she was 78 years and 11 months old.
• All of the songwriters and producers involved with this track were men, but they crafted the song so it would appeal to a female audience. The lyrics are about moving on with confidence after a failed relationship.
• The song's vocal effect came from an unlikely source. Cher recalled to Q magazine December 2013: "While we were recording 'Believe' in the UK, I saw Roachford on a morning TV show. He was singing with a vocoder and guitar, and it sounded so great. My producer said, 'You can't do that after you've recorded the song. But I was playing around with the pitch machine and I think I can get something interesting from that...' So he played it and we just smiled at each other. It was exactly what we needed to make the really boring verse... sing."
• Proving that there is plenty of substance to this song, the Australian group DMA's covered it on the Triple J radio show Like A Version in October 2016. Their rendition got over 3 million views on YouTube, prompting them to released the song on digital platforms in April 2017.
• In the 2001 Friends episode "The One With Chandler's Dad," this plays as Chandler and Monica arrive in Vegas to meet Chandler's estranged father.
  
  It was also used on these TV series:
  
  Splitting Up Together ("Go Out The Lights" – 2019)
  Mr. Sunshine ("Hostile Workplace" – 2011)
  Will & Grace ("Whose Mom Is It, Anyway?" – 1999)
  Buffy The Vampire Slayer ("Living Conditions" – 1999)
  Sex And The City ("Evolution" – 1999)
  
  It was also featured in the movie Land Of The Lost (2009).
• A casualty of this song's success was a movie called Happy Jack that was set to star Cher. She postponed it to tour and promote "Believe," and the film was never made.
• "Believe" is an empowering song about self-belief and resilience. According to Cher, she was singing in the bathtub, and it seemed to her the second verse needed to be more assertive, so she changed the lyric.
  
  "I thought, 'A girl can be sad in one verse, but she can't be sad in two verses,'" she told The Guardian. "I just won't have it. So, then I thought of the lines, 'I've had time to think it through. And maybe I'm too good for you.' I should have asked for a writing credit. I was so stupid!"
• Cher, 78, sang an un-Auto-Tuned "Believe" with Dua Lipa to open the 2024 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony, where she was inducted. She's very proud of the song and talked about it in her speech, saying:
  
  "'Believe,' I changed the sound of music forever. It was an accident. My producer and I were having a fight because he said, 'Cher, do it better,' because 'Believe' was kind of a bitch in the beginning - it wasn't that good. I said, 'If you want it better, find another singer!' He called me later in the afternoon and said, 'Cher,' I've been playing around with a pitch machine, and I think I got something. He started to play it, and when it was over, we jumped up and high-fived each other - it was a moment.
  
  Then, the head of my record company said, 'We can't do that because no one will know that it's you. I said, 'Yes! That's the great part!'"
• Want to see actress Keira Knightley perform "Believe" with her teeth? Check out her dental rendition on The Graham Norton show.