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"Believe" is a song recorded by American singer-actress Cher. It is the title track from her twenty-second studio album of the same name (1998), and was released as the lead single from the album on October 19, 1998 by Warner Bros. Records. It was written by Brian Higgins, Stuart McLennen, Paul Barry, Steven Torch, Matthew Gray, Timothy Powell, Jeff Lynne, and Cher and produced by Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling. A considerable departure from Cher's work at the time, "Believe" abandoned the singer's then pop-rock-based repertoire in favor being more club-friendly, in order to engage a younger audience. "Believe" is an upbeat dance-pop song. The song is the first commercial recording to feature the audio processor software Auto-Tune, which is used to produce the prominent altered effect on Cher's vocals. This technique would eventually become known as the "Cher effect". Lyrically, the song is about the personal empowerment and self-sufficiency after a painful break-up. Critically, "Believe" has been met with appreciation ever since its release; reviewers have praised its production, catchiness and club-friendly nature, and listed it as one of the singer's career highlights. The song was also nominated for two Grammy Awards; for Record of the Year and Best Dance Recording, winning the latter. Commercially, the song attained immense global success, reaching number one in almost every country it charted, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. It earned Cher a place in the ''Guinness Book of World Records'' as the oldest female solo artist to top the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 chart. It also became the highest-selling single by a solo female artist in the United Kingdom. "Believe" remains one of the best-selling singles of all time with sales of over 11 million copies worldwide.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Amazon.co.uk: Cher: Albums, Songs, Biogs, Photos )〕 The music video for "Believe", directed by Nigel Dick, showed Cher in a nightclub performing the song in two different sequences: one in which she is seen performing the song on stage and the other as a supernatural being locked in a cage. Cher has performed the song in a number of live appearances, including in three of her concert tours, most recently the Dressed to Kill Tour in 2014. It has been covered by a number of artists, and has been featured in several elements of popular culture. Scholars and academics noted the way in which Cher was able to re-invent herself and remain fresh and contemporary amidst the more teen pop-based music of the period. They also credited "Believe" as the song which restored the singer's popularity and cemented her position as a pop culture icon. ==Background and composition== As released, the single incorporates the work of six different songwriters, two producers and executive producer Rob Dickins, the erstwhile chairman of Warner Bros, but according to Mark Taylor the creation of "Believe" was a "strange one." Originally written by Brian Higgins, Matthew Gray, Stuart McLennen and Timothy Powell and circulated on Warner as a demo for months, nobody wanted it. Mark Taylor said that "everyone loved the chorus but not the rest of the song; As we were already writing other songs for Cher, Rob asked us if we could sort it out. Two of our writers, Steve Torch and Paul Barry, got involved and eventually came up with a complete song that Rob and Cher were happy with."〔 (updated with Historical Footnote)〕 Once the demo version was agreed, Mark and Brian took over for the actual production, working at Dreamhouse; Mark said "We knew the rough direction to take, because Rob had said he wanted to make a Cher dance record. The hard part was trying to make one that wouldn't alienate Cher's existing fans."〔 The entire track was assembled with Cubase VST on an iMac G3 computer, with other synthesizers, including a Clavia Nord Rack and an Oberheim Matrix 1000, while Cher's vocals were recorded on three TASCAM DA88 digital audio recorders with a Neumann U67 vacuum tube-amplified microphone.〔 The song was recorded approximately in ten days in Surrey, United Kingdom. Cher's voice is altered by a pitch correction speed that is "set too fast for the audio that it is processing."〔 Producer Mark Taylor added the effect to Cher's vocal simply as a kind of mischievous experiment. In interviews at the time, he claimed to be testing out his recently purchased DigiTech Talker.〔 It later emerged that the effect was not created by a vocoder, but by using extreme (and then-unheard-of) settings on Antares Auto-Tune.〔 Taylor said about the effect that "this was the most nerve-wracking part of the project, because I wasn't sure what Cher would say when she heard what I'd done to her voice", but that when she heard it she said, "It sounds great."〔 When her record company requested that the effect be removed, she responded, "Over my dead body!" After the massive success of the song, use of Auto-Tune became very popular and many other artists imitated this technique, and it would eventually become known as the "Cher effect"."Believe" is a dance-pop song.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Throwback Thursday: 'Believe' by Cher, the song that brought you Auto-Tune () )〕 The song samples a drum-machine pattern off Daft Punk's 1998 single Revolution 909.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Cher's Believe sample of Daft Punk's Revolution 909 - WhoSampled )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Believe (Cher song)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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