I can't pronounce many foreign words, but I know Chaka Khan

Throughout a 40-year career, Yvette Marie Stevens has had a number of great songwriters (Stevie Wonder, Prince) write songs specifically for her, but "Through the Fire"by David Foster is my current heavy cheese play.

"Tell Me Something Good" is pure funk, but surprisingly too slow these days for our frenetically-paced digital world - I kept looking for the speed-up button, or waiting for it to kick into a higher gear.  "I Feel For You" still holds its own on the dance floor, but as a society we've outgrown the taste for empty sugar-cereal electronica as well, and the video looks dated.  So why do I prefer Chaka mouthing pap?  Because the chorus is happy and sad all at the same time, rich and lush and then Chaka goes all swoony at the end.  She could sing a song where the only lyric was "hairbrush", repeated over and over, harnessing her Chaka Chakra, as it were, and still make it mean something.  (Contrast with the Renee Olstead version, a perfectly capable chanteuse in her own right, and see how the tune becomes Vegasy in lesser hands.)

If you're bent on rocking out, cue up Chaka's cover of "Until You Come Back To Me", the one lifted from German television, and note that her very unusual, almost hillbillyish way of pronouncing "your" on "Through the Fire" is not a one-off.  Just Chaka being Chaka, some would say, not giving a f*** about pronunciation when she has a voice that can drench five-alarmers.  And that's fine with me.

But if it throws you, here is an acoustic version by Hilary Mwelwa, who moved to London just in time to speak a purer English than, for example, Basia.  I love Danny White's arrangement and Basia's energy, which rarely reveals itself in her videos (or, when it does, awkwardly), and I melt at Basia's voice, but the "missin you/listen you" couplet has to be handled just a certain way for American ears, or it falls like bad meringue.