Christmas Interviews

So Cher has been doing a plethora of interviews for the new album.

Recently she was on I Heart Radio talking with Mario Lopez about not wanting a true blue Christmas album but once she got the DJ song, she felt, “I can do this. I can find myself in here.”  She wanted songs that didn’t “scream Christmas.” She likes the album’s different kinds of music and emotions.  Lopez calls the DJ song a “banger,” Cher says it was her assistant’s idea for her to sing “Home.” She says her best childhood gift was a white leather cowboy jacket with fringe. She says she was already into clothes and “so thrilled.” She remembers decorating the tree that year and says she was a stern Taurus taskmaster for decorating the tree that year, only letting everyone put on three pieces of tinsel at a time.”

You might remember this photo from one of Cher’s biographies.

She recently did a lip synch of  “DJ Play a Christmas Song” during The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (but per Mr. Cher Scholar, it was so cold and open-air that so did everyone else) and on Wetten Dass. Macy’s kept her to the end of the parade (with teasers all morning), like they always do, only to be followed by Santa Claus himself. Savannah Guthrie,  Hoda Kotb and Al Rokerall agreed it was an “epic” ending.

On Thanksgiving Day she was also on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.  Fallon told a funny joke at the top about how her Macy’s parade performance wasn’t planned. Cher just drives down the street and parades form around her.

Fallon also sent a cardboard standup Cher crowd surfing. He tried to imitate her but sounded more southern than Cher. He kept saying to the surfing standup, “Be careful Cher!” And that made me laugh.

The studio audience wouldn’t stop yelling when Cher first appeared in the cute freezer skit where she pretended Auto-tune was how her voice normally sounded. She also joked that her name was really pronounced “Shure.”

Before the interview, Fallon introduced her as “the most iconic on the planet” and noted that she’s had a number one single in each of the last six decades. She said most of the album was recorded in her house, except for a few of the songs in England. They talked about Cher’s love of the frozen hot-chocolatier Serendipity 3 and they made jokes about what her autobiography should be called, none of them good. Cher admitted she was uncomfortable with some of the stories she needed to tell, that she’d chickened out but needs to go back to it and put those stories back in. She complained that her life is so long, the book would need to be an encyclopedia.

Well, it just so happens Barbra Streisand’s career is just as long and she recently put out a tome, an autobiography weighing 3 pounds and  totaling 992 pages.  So…yeah, I’m gonna read that one too. Don’t worry Cher, we’ll read an encyclopedia. Think of this as your effort toward bringing back literacy.

But seriously, I was recently talking to Cher scholar Robrt Pela about the movie Chastity and if we would ever get word about who may have really directed it. Because this Alessio de Paola guy doesn’t seem to exist or to be a real name. Things like that. Will Cher ever “set the record straight.”

Cher recently said in one of the print interviews that she doesn’t care about her legacy. And that’s understandable. Her legacy will already be what it is. It’s done. People know things already or will think they know things.

The fact is, Cher doesn’t owe it to anybody to set the record straight. Everybody probably disagrees with what happened anyway. Nobody “deserves” to know the private part of anybody else, the backstory of anybody.

Personally speaking, there’s just something to be said about leaving this world in an honest way. There’s an integrity in that.

But what form that honesty takes….who knows. It may just be a slew of deathbed confessions.

Perspective is always good in a biography (and seems to be what Streisand’s book may be providing). But I am always interested in influence. What are all the things that made Cher who she is, like from what music Sonny liked to what music she was listening to before and after Sonny. Family history, dramatic experiences and stuff people gravitate towards even as kids.

Anyways, one exciting piece of news from the press junket of interviews, (and the resulting deluge of clips were overwhelming, from long interviews to click-bait clips), is that Cher will be working on a new album on the heels of this one. She says she has “one more in me.” But then again, she keeps saying that about tours, too.

Paper

https://www.papermag.com/cher-cover

The first thing that killed me about this cover story is that the interviewer, Justin Morgan, first heard Cher being played by his mother from her CD The Very Best of Cher in 2003!! Morgan says the cover of that best-of “seemed to foreshadow the defining high-gloss imagery of our digital age.”

Morgan notes that Cher wears track pants and this harkens back to interviews in the 1980s where Cher would hold court in her bedroom wearing sweatpants.

Cher said she gave songwriter Sarah Hudson specific instructions for “Drop Top Sleigh Ride,” that it be “something that sounds like it would be a kid thing, but I want you to turn it into an adult thing.” We learn that Tyga wrote his verse.

Cher says of her voice: “I just never liked my voice that much. If I had my choice, I would have another one….it doesn’t sound like a man, it doesn’t wound like a woman. I’m somewhere more in-between. I have this strange style. I do what you do when you can’t hold a note: I don’t pronounce my Rs. I guess some consonants are hard to sing, so I just gotta leave them open…..it’s definitely my mom’s voice. My mom’s is softer, mine is edgier.”

Cher questions Morgan on the quality of her greatest hits, “Well, was it the very best?” They then talk about all Cher’s non-hits, songs Cher thought would do better: “Song for the Lonely,” “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” and “Walking in Memphis” and how people love these songs at live shows. “The audience makes it sound like they were hits, but they weren’t”

(I call this the “River Deep Mountain High” phenomenon. Some hits were never hits.)

Cher says, “I thought Closer to the Truth was a really good album, but it just didn’t happen.”

Morgan calls the song “The Music’s No Good Without You” “such a weird, amazing, almost cult-sounding pop song.”

Cher talks about “Save Up All Your Tears” and how “that was one of my favorite songs and I was singing about a boyfriend who had broken up with me. So it had a special feeling for me and I thought it was something that everybody could relate to, but not so much….I was really pissed off when I was singing it.”

Morgan argues “you have incredible instincts, though” and they talk about the auto-tune in “Believe” and the story about how it came to be, how “it really picked up the verses, because I could never make the verses really work. And all of a sudden, they were so amazing, they just pulled you in. Also, it didn’t sound like me, so I was really excited. We high-fived…the first thing [Warner head Rob Dickins] said was, ‘It doesn’t sound like you,” and I said, “I know, it’s glorious.’”

She says of “DJ Play a Christmas Song” that the producers “did a lot of really interesting things if you listen hard.”

She talks about dancing in the 1970s and 1980s at Studio 54 and with Michelle Pfeiffer in Saint-Tropez (“until our hair was wet.”) She talks about Studio 54 being “heaven” and also dancing at Café Central.

Cher says success is “a fleeing thing….I don’t like failure, but success is not a thing. Success is like different moments, like pearls, and if you string them on long enough, you’ve got a necklace….I’ve had lots of failures [laughs]. It’s like I always thought reinventing myself is such bullshit because it was just that I feel out of grace or I didn’t have a job or wasn’t doing something and then I did have a job.”

Thank you. Cher has remained consistently Cher. The reinvention story was attributed to her and Sonny as early as 1971.

Justin insists she must have intuition on how to make it happen and she says “I don’t really. I just don’t quit….it’s the only thing I know. So when I couldn’t get a record deal, I made movies. She tells the story of her mom being friends with Robert Altman’s wife and how then Robert Altman discovered Cher was in New York auditioning. Cher said she read for the Jimmy Dean part and thought “I don’t know how to do this part, but I’d be good in this part.” (Sounds like Witches of Eastwick, too).

Of the Christmas album Cher says “Even though the songs are not relatives, they live well together.”

And she tells of her plans for a new album with songs like “Fairness” brought to her by her boyfriend Alexander Edwards and how the 96-year old vocal teacher, Adrienne Angel, helped her get her voice back just as she did in 1987 when she recorded “I Found Someone.” She might have even thanked her on the liner notes if I remember correctly. Yup, just checked. (See pic to the left.)

They talk about world events. Cher says “the more people in the mix [the better], and different sounds and different voices….art is still art and the more it is circulating the better. It’s like paintings: there’s every style, there’s millions of painters, but it doesn’t diminish anybody else.”

I LOVE that!

On the idea of her manifesting songs or parts, Cher says, “I don’t overthink it. I open my mouth and sing or get in front of a camera and act.”

Morgan asks if she thinks about her legacy and she says, “I don’t care about legacy….I’ve done what I’ve done and people will do with it what they will.”

She talks about the movies her mother introduced her to and admiring Etta James and how it’s always scary for her to play Madison Square Garden (I saw her there for the Believe tour). She says it’s so big and how you are judged differently there. (From my experience, New Yorkers love Cher though…reverently).

She talks about being frightened for [vulnerable] people now. “You have to be one thing….all the things that add spice and excitement and beauty, unless you do it in their way, it’s not good and they want to get rid of it….it’s just a terrible, terrible period.”

Vanity Fair (Spanish)

Those crimped wig shots are great.

I first saw a portion of this article on Facebook as part of the press junket. The article is in Spanish, (which you can have Google Chrome browser translate or actually, now the article gives you an official translation) and below are excerpts from the English translation.

The cover reads, “On the successes, the mistakes, the politics, human rights and love (yes, again). The legend speaks.”

The article is by Simone Marchetti who says, “What’s going on in Cher’s head isn’t just a show. It’s a firework.”

And again Cher says, “I’m not a Cher fan. Cher is just a part of me. Cher’s my job.” Cher talks about being stubborn, neurotic, childish and funny and “kind of adorable” and this is pretty adorable the way she says it in the video.

She talks about singing with her grandfather when she was young as he played the guitar.

She says something I can’t quite understand about when she left Sonny she was still “practically a child. I had no idea what it meant to make a decision, to be an adult. Two record companies abandoned me. I changed my skin, my music, my image. But with Sonny I felt very small just when he needed to realize that he wasn’t small.” (I didn’t think that was translating properly but the official English isn’t much clearer).

She says she’s like her mother but also nicer, similar to her father. In ten years she thinks she might be dead. “I wish you all the luck in the world. But I won’t be here anymore.”

The Guardian

This was a good, long interview by Jim Farber. Cher says she should be in Guinness Book of World Records for her six-decade career. She always believed Christmas albums were a cynical cliche, “Everyone has done one.” Faber tells her the album doesn’t “scream Christmas every second and isn’t filled with songs you know by name.”

Half the songs are new and he says the DJ song “evokes a night that’s anything but silent.” He also mentions the Zombies’ rapturous “This Will Be Our Year.”

Cher wanted the album to be fun. Farber calls “fun” Cher’s brand from the very beginning and the bubbly “I Got You Babe.”

And he comments on her resilience: “The long years when critics saw her as a joke, Cher always found a way to have the last laugh by embracing the most garish aspects of her career – the over-the-top costumes, the self-satirizing gestures, the songs Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves – while simultaneously delivering performances of genuine distinction, passion and pluck.”

Of the Darlene Love Christmas song in 1963, Cher says, “I can see Darlene singing full-tilt boogie right in the room, not even in a booth, and me, Sonny and the other backup singers standing around one mike that was hanging down. It seems so archaic now, but it worked.”

She has a home studio now and rolls right outa bed. Times. Changed.

Cher continues, “I kept thinking, I’m only 17 and I’m exhausted, what are these other people doing? What I didn’t realize then was they were all doing drugs!…The big joke was that I had to stand far back from the other singers. Phil would say, ‘Cher, take a step back. And another step. And another.’ At that point everybody said, ‘If she takes one more step, she’ll be in Studio B!’ Somehow, my voice just cut through.”

She talks about how on the day of the album release was the day President Kennedy got shot.

She was the lone female backup in “You’ve’ Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” She talks about how Phil Spector wasn’t as crazy at the time, just eccentric, and that she could hold her own with him even when he wanted her to spy on The Ronettes.

Cher says she wasn’t crushed about the failure of “Ringo, I Love You.” She says, “It wasn’t a very good song anyway and Phil didn’t even want to do it. He wanted me to stay in my place and not do a solo thing.”

About IGUB: “[Sonny] brought it to me in the middle of the night. With him singing it, it sounded horrible. When I first sang it, id didn’t sound that much better. But Sonny didn’t care. He knew what he had.”

Cher talks about how lucky England has been for her over the years, from her first success there with “I Got You Babe.”

She talks about getting dropped from Geffen and finding success in England with Warner UK and “Believe” and that song hitting #1 in ten countries and spawning songs in auto-tune, particularly in hip hop .

She talks about the empowering twist in the line of the song she wrote: “I’ve had time to think it through/ and maybe I’m too good for you” and how she thought at the time, “a girl can be sad in one verse, but she can’t be sad in two verses.” She says she failed to ask for a writing credit for that.

They talk about Adam Lambert’s performance of the song at the Kennedy Center Honors. “That’s one of the greatest vocal performances of any song by anybody. “ Faber notes the Lambert’s clip has 32 million YouTube views (33 now).

Jim Farber thinks her voice “never sounded stronger” than it does on the Christmas album.

She’s demure about her love life with Edwards: “There are things people get to know and there are things people don’t get to know.” (Not a bad policy.)

They end on politics and the Cher references “something like 500 [anti-trans] bills they’re trying to pass” around America.

She talks about her connection with Armenia and her visit there thinking, “Wow, everybody looks like me! How could I not have strong feelings about this?”

She talks about how long women in her family live, her mother living to 98, her great-aunts living to 101 and 104.

 

AARP

Edna Gundersen interviews Cher for this article. She talks about not wanting to be traditional with the album and Gundersen says, “and that could be the mantra of her 60-year career.”

“I wanted it to be a Cher Christmas album, whatever that means. I knew what it meant in my emotions, but I didn’t know how it was going to manifest.”

Gundersen, like Morgan, notes Cher attends the interview in black lounge pants and a gray fleece hoodie. Gundersen notes that “Edwards has been a high point in a period of loss.”

Gundersen says “Your voice sounds better than ever, especially on ‘Angels in the Snow’ and ‘ Like Christmas.'” Cher says her doctor told her she has the vocal cords of a 25-year old.

Gundersen likes that Cher “dug up a wonderful but somewhat obscure song, the Zombies’ “This Will Be Our Year” from 1968 and Cher admits she didn’t “love it in the beginning. I just had to have an extra song for Amazon, and it was there. It was kind of the redheaded stepchild. At first, I didn’t have the respect for it that it deserved. But I listened to it a few times and thought, This is great. It works for me.”

Of the Darlene Love session of 1963, Cher says, “Darlene opened her mouth to sing, we all stopped breathing. She was just genius.”

Of Tyga singing her “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” she says, “I was gung ho. It just lifted it for me.”

They talk about “Believe” and Gundersen says, “Your altered vocals revolutionized hip-hop. Do you feel you got proper recognition for the leap into Auto-Tune?” Cher says, “a lot of young people love ‘Believe’ because it sounds current, but they don’t know who Cher is.”

She talks about Christmas and how she does love Christmas and how the house is always full of strays, kids and friends and how her mother always did a great job with Christmas even though she had no money.

She talks about dyslexia and Tina Turner and how Tina asked her how she left Sonny back in the 1970s and Cher said, “I just walked out one night” and how Tina then did the same. Cher says that over the last four or five years she had been visiting Tina, how they were opposites in many ways but kindred sisters. (Tina had stuff everywhere but Cher likes cleaner surfaces, how Tina never swore and Cher swears like a sailor.)

Cher says nice things about Madonna. And she talks about she came together with Alexander: “I just didn’t think it would be a good thing. He was way too young. He’s very stubborn, and he just didn’t see it my way.”

That’s sweet. They talk about Cher’s memoir and how she’s been feeling too protective. “There are certain stories you don’t want to tell, but those are going to be the most interesting and helpful.”

 

New York Times

This article is by Melena Ryzik. Cher says of her career. “While I was busy being Cher, how did this happen? No one’s given me any info.”

They talk about the homeless, elephants and Cherlato. Of her Christmas album, Cher says, “It needs to be lighthearted because, you know, who knows what next Christmas will bring.”

Oh dear. I worry about this, myself.

Ryzik asks a very interesting question: “how did you first musical conversations with Alexander go?” [and I’d like to know same about Sonny, Gregg and Les.]

Cher says, “He talks about music a lot and we play music a lot. And he knew from knowing me what I would like. There are certain chord progressions and sounds on any record that your body responds to, your emotions respond to. He just had me pegged so right.”

She again credits Adrienne Angel, who she reminds us she found through Bernadette Peters who needed her for “Sunday in the Park with George.” “I just wanted it to sound like my voice. I didn’t want to have to lower any keys.”

Cher talks about older people signing well into their seventies, “It seems like a lot of us are having some sort of resurgence. I don’t know what it is. Revenge of the old people.”

Of “Believe” she says, “We were just trying to fix a problem.” Ryzik asks, “Do you mind that sound being associated with you?” and Cher says,  “Are you kidding? I love it….what comes to you, belongs to you. That’s my theory about life.”

“I live in Malibu. I can see the ocean, and that’s my favorite thing. I love my house. I’m grateful.”

 

Cher was on The Today Show, 28 November joking she would just love to see 70 again. There were also interesting stories on Entertainment Tonight and in Forbes which talks about how “DJ Play a Christmas Song” opened at #3 on the Dance/Electronic Digital Song Sales chart, which was only her third track to do this but that most of her dance hits predate the online chart.