Cher has a lot going on right now it seems: family stuff, elephant stuff, professional-sounding stuff. More on that in later weeks.

For now I want to talk about an announcement Cher made back in January of this year (2025) as reported by The Cher World:

“Cher just announced in VEJA that her upcoming album will be her last: ‘I’m almost certain that this will be my LAST ALBUM because there simply comes a time when the voice is no longer fit for singing. My voice is not the same. That’s why I’m trying to record the new album as quickly as possible. But anything can happen. I will give my best and I hope people will like it.'” 

I just saw this last week and thought for a few days Cher had just said it. So I was mulling it over the last few days, what to think about the idea of a final Cher anything. And like many fans I feel both understanding about it and yet inevitably crestfallen. On the one hand, it’s probably hard to belt out power ballads after you’re 80. On the other hand, who cares?

Frank Sinatra (The Voice himself) sang for years after he famously lost his voice to vocal-chord hemorrhaging in 1950. And if he had stopped we wouldn’t have the iconic songs “Love and Marriage“(1955)  or “It Was a Very Good Year” (1965) or “Strangers in the Night” (1966) or “That’s Life” (1966), “My Way” (1969) or the “Theme from New York, New York” (1977). Truly, he didn’t sound as good. But lesser-than Sinatra was still very interesting.

I have noticed Cher singing differently in some most recent live appearances. But everyone is still loving her doing it. And besides, Cher has sung differently in almost every decade over the last seven. It’s part of this whole, long journey.

While I was thinking about all this, I was finishing up a review of the Farewell Tour TV special (which took me many, many weeks to finish due to its many lengths in all directions and a sudden fourteen day illness). In the interviews for that special, Cher talks about wanting to finish touring while she’s performing at her best and not wanting to hear people say the last tour was better. But then D2K was even better (I thought) in many creative respects. So I’m glad she didn’t stop touring two decades ago.

And then I started watching Dear Mom, Love Cher again (the next TV special I need to document) and in that special Cher is telling her mother, Georgia Holt, she will have to get out there and work to support Georgia’s new album. And Georgia says no, she can’t sing anymore like she used to. (And Georgia is 86 at this time.) But Cher is not having it. She retorts that Georgia was singing with her just now and she could hear her singing just fine. To underscore her point Cher tells Georgia that she (Cher) been in this business for 47 years  (and Cher and Georgia and Paulette Howell, who is offscreen, argue about how many years it really has been and they come back to 47) and Cher knows a thing or two about what she’s talking about.

It seems like the same juncture.

On the special, Cher and Georgia lip sync “I’m Just Your Yesterday” together (a song they recorded in the late 1970s) and for years I’ve been trying not to unhear the post-millennial-Cher singing that song in the track. With earphones on while listening to the DVD this time I could finally hear the late 1970s Cher voice. And  I have always believed that era was her peak voice (for me), the clearest, most confident and free-sounding Cher voice. What if she had stopped singing after that? God help us. We would have missed the Geffen records, the Warner UK records, the later-day duets, the Abba thing, the Christmas album. There are albums I love after the late-70s and even songs I love on albums I don’t fully love.

Earlier in the special Cher also states she does care what people think, just not enough to not do what she wants to do. And to take her at her word at this is to give  much less weight to what anyone thinks about her singing now or at any time.

Then if we go back to one of the Farewell concert special speeches, there a point where Cher is telling young people to “just do it,” to not get hung up in “should I? should I?” I struggle with this myself, quite honestly, but it sounds like sound advice to me (unless to rape and pillage is your thing).

By Cher’s own rubric, she should do the f**k she wants to. She’s done the work; she’s done the time and if she wants to retire and sail around the Riviera (or whatever it is legends do nowadays when they’re not entertaining), she should do it. If she wants to keep belting out loud power ballads or sing soft country numbers or earthy folk songs or whispery Billie Eilish knockoffs or just sing for herself in the shower and the devil-may-care about the rest of us, she should do it.

I, for one, will stay on the train to the end of the line and I’m pretty 100%-sure most of her other fans will, too, come hell or high water.

The Farewell Tour kind of reinforced how impossible Cher self-predictions are anyway. She’ll cross the bridge of her “My Way” when she gets there and so will we then too, when she finally decides we have heard the last song of her.

But I hope Cher is still signing until the very end of the line, until the twelfth of never. And that’s a long, long time.

Because it’s Cher’s 79th birthday today and Georgia is on my mind, let’s revisit the t-shirt her mother Georgia was once spotted in, the one that has Steve Jobs saying “I made Apple” and Bill Gates saying, “I made Microsoft” and Mark Zuckerburg saying, “I made Facebook,” all below a picture of Georgia saying “Bitch please, I made Cher!!”

Happy birthday, Cher.