'Believe' turns 20: How Cher's Auto-Tuned hit changed music forever

Maeve McDermott | USA TODAY

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Twenty years ago, a pop star on a downswing took a chance on a brand-new piece of recording software to do the unthinkable: taking her voice, her most recognizable asset, and robotizing it almost beyond recognition.

Cher's "Believe," her megahit that turns 20 on Monday, changed the way modern music is made, an amusing distinction for a song with vocals that bear more than a passing resemblance to Kermit the Frog.

Yet, that doesn't mean the distinction isn't deserved. Without "Believe," the first song to introduce Auto-Tune to the mainstream, who knows if, or how, the then-fledgling vocal effects program would've become the mainstay it is today, transforming pop vocals before revolutionizing the past decade of hip-hop.

The Auto-Tuned vocals in "Believe" almost didn't make the track's final cut, Cher told The New York Times in a 1999 interview. She wanted to make a dance-floor-friendly single that appealed to her gay fan base after the disappointing sales of her 1995 album "It's a Man's World."

Her record label's president said that "everyone loves that song but wants to change that part of it,'" she said, describing her meeting with her record label's president about the song. ''I said, 'You can change that part of it, over my dead body!' And that was the end of the discussion. I said to ("Believe" co-producer Mark Taylor) before I left, 'Don't let anyone touch this track, or I'm going to rip your throat out.'"

After months of producers and co-writers tinkering with the original version, Cher came across a track by British singer/songwriter Andrew Roachford that used a vocoder to manipulate his vocals.

''We were tackling 'Believe' for the gazillionth time,'' she told The Times. ''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.'"

Once Cher suggested manipulating her vocals, Taylor began tinkering with the song on Auto-Tune, a recording program that had been on the market for just a year, intended – and still widely used today – to help producers make infinitesimal pitch corrections to recorded music.

What Auto-Tune wasn't intended for, though, is making its singers sound like robots. Yet Taylor unlocked Auto-Tune's potential for drastically distorting vocals for stylistic effect, which shocked the creator of Auto-Tune, Andy Hildebrand, an electrical engineer who cited "Believe" as a turning point in a 2017 interview.

“I didn’t think anybody in their right mind would ever use that (effect),” Hildebrand said.

More: How Cher became an icon for a new generation, from 'Mamma Mia' to her beloved Twitter

Hildebrand couldn't have predicted the influence of "Believe" and its pioneering use of Auto-Tune, not as a cosmetic clean-up tool but as its own distinct stylistic effect. And it started with "Believe," which would become the top song of 1999, win Cher a Grammy for best dance recording and hit No. 1 in 17 countries, making her the oldest female performer (at 53) to score a No. 1 single in the USA.

And decades later, "I honestly think that the most fun I ever had making a song was 'Believe,'" Cher told Billboard in 2015.

For her, a true queen of pop music reinvention, it's all about the element of surprise. "Because you didn't know it was me in the beginning," she said, "and I was so excited."