Watch Cher Perform at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2024

Cher was one of three performers that Victoria’s Secret tapped for its grand return. Tyla and Lisa joined her in the lineup.

Cher, now 78, previously spoke to ELLE in 2018 about the longevity of her career. “Look, I’ve had huge failures in my life,” she said. “Huge dips and ‘Oh, you’re over. You’re over.’ This one guy once said, ‘You’re over,’ every year for I don’t know how many years. And I just said to him, ‘You know what? I will be here when you’re not doing what you do anymore.’ I had no idea if I was right or wrong. I was just tired of hearing him say it.

She spoke to AARP last October about her impact on the music industry. The magazine asked if she felt she received proper recognition for helping lead “the leap” into Auto-Tune. She responded by sharing the story of how her song “Believe” came to sound like it does.

“You can only get credit for so long,” she said. “Some producers know. Kids don’t know. A lot of young people love ‘Believe’ because it sounds current, but they don’t know who Cher is. They don’t know I’m singing it.

“The sound came from a big argument. The verses were difficult because they just laid there. So Mark [Taylor, her producer] kept saying, ‘You’ve got to sing it better,’ and he said it one too many times. I said, ‘If you want it better, get another singer,’ and I walked out. I’d been there forever trying to make it better, and I just had no other tricks in my bag.

“I saw this boy [Andrew Roachford] the next day using a vocoder on a British morning show. I asked Mark about that, and he said he had a pitch machine. He said, ‘Give me a couple of hours.’ Later he played it, and I was thrilled. We just high-fived. Then we had to talk [Warner Music UK exec] Rob Dickins into putting it out. He said, ‘It doesn’t sound like you.’ I said, ‘That’s the genius of it.’”

Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.