You can pick virtually any Tina Turner hit to tidily emblematize her career—a career filled with rivers deep and mountains high, a career of rolling on churning waters, a career that was simply, well, you know. But today’s news of her death at age 83 also brings to mind a song that wasn’t itself as big of a hit: a squelchy artifact of 1980s production techniques called “I Might Have Been Queen.”
At the time Turner released the song, in 1984, she did not feel like a queen. She had been struggling to secure success as a solo artist after the dissolution of her abusive marriage and creative partnership with Ike Turner. She did not know that the album she was working on, Private Dancer, would help launch her into eternal legend. But her Buddhist faith gave her comfort, as did the advice of a psychic who told her she’d been a pharaoh in a past life. So the songwriters Jeannette Obstoj, Rupert Hine, and Jamie West-Oram wrote her an anthem about reincarnation: “I look down and I’m there in history,” went one line that Turner delivered in her majestically strange sing-growl. “I’m a soul survivor.”
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