Cher – Believe (2018 Remaster)

Cher – BELIEVE (2018 REMASTER) is the first-ever vinyl pressing of one of the most commercially and culturally significant pop records of the 1990s, released by Warner Records to mark the album’s 20th anniversary with a newly remastered audio transfer catalogued at 5735011.

Cher and the Record That Rewrote the Rules

Cher’s career is basically the blueprint for reinvention in pop music. That deep contralto voice is instantly recognizable, and across six decades she backed it up with genuinely innovative production spanning disco, synth-pop, and rock. Believe, released in 1998, sits at a particular peak of that trajectory. The album is dedicated to her ex-husband Sonny Bono, who died earlier that year, and it arrived as a Grammy-nominated, 4x platinum statement that nobody saw coming. The title track did something that had never been done quite that way before: it put Auto-Tune front and center as a deliberate creative tool, not a correction, and the sound of popular music shifted around it. Beyond that single moment of production history, “Believe” pushed Cher past records that still stand. She became the oldest female artist to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, broke the record for the longest span between number one hits for a solo artist (her previous chart-topper “Dark Lady” dated back to 1974), and extended the gap from her very first number one, Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” in 1965, to a span of 33 years. Those are not soft statistics.

Cher – BELIEVE (2018 REMASTER): What This Pressing Actually Is

This LP on Warner Records is the album’s vinyl debut, full stop. For the 20th anniversary, the record was remastered in 2018 and pressed to wax for the first time, which means anyone who wanted to hear this album on a turntable had simply been waiting. The remaster brings a freshness to a production that already had a lot going on sonically, and the full ten-track sequence holds up well across both sides. Beyond the title track, the album includes “Strong Enough,” “Dov’e L’Amore,” and “We All Sleep Alone,” tracks that demonstrate the range of the record beyond the radio moment everyone remembers.

Why a Collector Should Pay Attention

First pressings of anniversary editions tied to a genuinely significant release tend to matter, and this one has a clear claim to significance on multiple levels: chart history, production history, and personal context all converge on one record. The fact that it took twenty years for a vinyl version to exist at all makes this copy the definitive physical format for the album. If you have any serious interest in late-90s pop, the history of production technology, or simply in Cher’s discography, this is the copy that belongs in a collection. Warner Records, catalog 5735011, LP format.

Tracklist

1. BELIEVE
2. THE POWER
3. RUNAWAY
4. ALL OR NOTHING
5. STRONG ENOUGH
6. DOV'E L'AMORE
7. TAKIN' BACK MY HEART
8. TAXI TAXI
9. LOVE IS THE GROOVE
10. WE ALL SLEEP ALONE