Carter’s argument was the evidence in front of him: the voice, the stage show, the “Let’s Stay Together” chart performance. He argued that what he was hearing was commercial potential that the categories were failing to account for. He was right, and the label eventually gave him the resources to prove it.
The two-week deadline for an album reflected the label’s hedged commitment: they would give her a deal, but they wanted an album quickly, which limited their exposure if the project didn’t work. The approach that Roger Davies took in response to the deadline was not to rush the recording of a set of original songs that Tina Turner might write under pressure, but to find the best available material that could be recorded quickly and well by an artist of her specific capabilities.
This meant licensing songs from other writers, which is how “What’s Love Got to Do with It” arrived via Terry Britten, how “Private Dancer” arrived as a Mark Knopfler composition (written for Dire Straits but not recorded by them), how “Better Be Good to Me” arrived. The album was assembled from material that matched what Tina Turner could do, rather than built around a thematic or stylistic concept that would require time to develop.
The approach was efficient and it was artistically correct. The songs were good. The productions were distinctive. And the voice that ran through all of them had the kind of authority that comes from thirty years of performing — not the vocal authority of a twenty-five-year-old who can hit every note at full power, but the authority of a performer who has been doing this long enough to know exactly how to inhabit a song, when to push and when to hold back, when the emotion calls for rawness and when it calls for control.