cyndilauper

So you’ve been wondering where Cyndi Lauper’s been. She admits she’s a year late in coming out with her new album, Hat Full Of Stars, while seated in her living room in the Althrop building on the upper west side of Manhattan. She looks like a normal American girl-next-door, with no make-up, oversized painter pants and a big, black T-shirt with white socks and no shoes. What color hair this time? Blonde, of course, in a pageboy style.

Since the hugely successful She’s So Unusual (“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was the monster single) in 1983, which led to Rolling Stone magazine dubbing her “Best New Artist” and MTV tapping her as “Best Female Video Artist,” Cyndi released True Colors in 1986, which spawned yet another hit single in the title track. She then went on to Paris to record her action-packed live concert video, “Cyndi Lauper in Paris,” followed by 1989’s A Night To Remember.

Fast-forward to 1993, and her latest album, Hat Full Of Stars, which she co-produced with Junior Vasquez (Tevin Campbell, Siouxsie and the Banshees). Lauper speaks with enthusiasm and good humor, drifting in and out of her Queens accent, as she philosophizes about creativity and her career, occasionally breaking into refraines from the songs themselves.

Q: Where have you been since your last album?

CYNDI: In 1991 I got married to David Thornton, while we were doing a movie together called Off and Running. He was the murderer, and I met him on the set. We fell in love in Miami, which is a great place to fall in love. After going to Liverpool to do the John Lennon tribute, we went to Cape Cod [Massachusetts] for a couple of months, where I started writing. I went to Berlin to do The Wall. And then I started working on “Who Let iIn the Rain” from the new album, which I wrote with Ailee Willis, who really helped me as a friend. I then started writing with the Hooters and the encouragement of my husband.

Q: Did you feel that you had to compete with Madonna for your audience?

CYNDI: I knew at one point that her record company was competing with me. They put an advertisement out in the paper that said, “This fall, I will give Cyndi Lauper a run for her money.” She can have it. It’s like apples and oranges. Madonna is really bright. I think she’s a performance artist. I saw her “Truth or Dare,” and I thought it was really good, but it’s not what I do. I’ve come to say something, and maybe some people don’t understand what it is. Maybe they thought it was a gimmick. It wasn’t. Even “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” wasn’t a gimmick. I wanted to bring women together. I saw how it was unpopular for mothers and daughters to be friendly. I said to myself, maybe we should fix that and make it popular. It brought women around the world together–it was a celebration, and I think that’s very important.

Q: In “Product of Misery” from the new album, who are you specifically talking about?

CYNDI: I’m talking about people. Real people. The Bush/Quayle administration sold us a bill of goods, especially Barbara Bush, and I felt like I had to stand up to it. I’m not talking about what we’re sold to think real people are or what we’re sold to believe real people look like. What we’re taught is twisted, and I just wanted to write that. I wanted to write a work that was like a piece of literature.

Q: “Who Let in the Rain” and “Hat Full of Stars” seem introspective and sad. Is this the new Cyndi Lauper?

CYNDI: “Time After Time” [from True Colors] was sad. You always think that your truth is not worth anything, [that] it’s not what people want to hear. But the truth is, you can’t write what you don’t know about. I’ve got to know what I’m saying. In “Who Let in the Rain,” I broke up with someone that I really cared for. People really feel things like that. If you really feel that, you should write about it. A year or two ago, I would not have said it. And I thought, “It’s too sad and nothing came out. But you have to write it.” Even though “Hat Full of Stars” is really sad, it’s also uplifting because she always had a hat full of stars. All my songs on this album are testimonies to people.

With her multimedia comeback firmly in place, Cyndi Lauper has successfully reinvented herself both as a performer and a personality.

In the intimate confines of the Ford Theatre, Lauper reintroduced herself to her L.A. faithful, who were out in force to hear what the songbird has been up to since she last recorded three years ago.

Lauper’s set consisted of all the songs, in order, from her upcoming Epic Records release, “Hat Full of Stars,” due June 15. With an energetic Lauper in fine voice and a first-rate band, the potent material is personal, yet commercially viable. The girl who just wanted to have fun has matured and ripened.

At 39 years old, the singer, whose obviously found happiness in her personal and professional life, is totally at ease on stage. While audience members shouted endearments and encouragement, Lauper kibbitzed with them as if they were old friends who haven’t seen each other in years. She even stopped in mid-set to sign an autograph to a fan who said she had once promised it to him.

Her sparkling personality only helped the new material, which swings through hip-hop, Celtic marches, pop bounce, folk, funk, pure rock ‘n’ roll and Cajun and African stylings.

While Lauper’s wide-ranging vocal ability could previously be described as annoying, it has taken on new strengths, running the gamot of emotions in her new work. She effortlessly alters singing styles to fit the song’s various moods.

The new Lauper sings about such serious issues as incest (“Lies”), abuse (“Broken Glass”), prejudices (“A Part Hate”) and death (“Sally’s Pigeons”) with just the right amount of sensitivity.

And although the material is so much more vital, it hasn’t lost its commercial appeal.

After her third record, “A Night to Remember,” bombed and her two film projects followed suit (one was actually never released, the other was “Vibes”), Lauper has gotten up the strength to do it again.

Her new film, “Life With Mikey,” has opened to lukewarm boxoffice, but based on the material performed here, the potential for her new disc is limitless.

Imagine yourself pumped and primed for a rare Cyndi Lauper club concert. It’s her first area appearance in four years. The show is running 45 minutes late, but, hey, that’s rock ‘n’ roll, right? It’s a weekend. And with Lauper, the kitschy queen of mid-’80s smart pop, so long on the sidelines, you find yourself missing her soulful exuberance, her playful feminism, her spunky individuality — to say nothing of the four singles she put into the Top 5 in 1984-’85. All of the late-’80s miscues are forgiven. You want to welcome her back with open arms.

But then the concert unfolds, and it turns out to be, largely, a fun- deficient experience. And this from the girl who once just wanted to have fun. An impossible bad dream?

No, reality at the packed Paradise Friday night, where the diminutive, dyed-blond, pageboy-coiffed singer played the last date of a brief US club tour, undertaken to fan the fires for the June 15 release of her album “Hat Full of Stars.”

Someone else might call what Lauper attempted Friday night bold and confident. I’d call what she did arrogant, and maybe even insulting. Because what she did was play the entirety of her upcoming album — 12 songs, in order — and made that the basis of her show. The only older songs came during encores. I know the “Hat Full of Stars” tunes were played sequentially only because Epic, her label, shipped me an advance CD. But I could tell from observation that her set befuddled many of the crowd.

Lauper started the night oddly by introducing her 12-piece band. Yawn. Why do it before a note is played? She then told the paying customers, “This is my record. Hope you like it.”

There are several problems here, the primary one being that Lauper was congratulating herself for her risk-taking while giving the people none of what they wanted. That’s a dicey proposition for someone on the comeback trail, someone whose peak of popularity was eight years back. And, as most pop fans know, it is very difficult to latch on to a song — its melody, mood or message — in just one hearing, especially in a live setting. Lyrics are unclear; hooks are not yet implanted in the brain.

So, given that: How was the new Cyndi? Trendy. Her pop is informed by hip- hop and New Jack swing; she’s reaching out for the Janet Jackson audience. She’s a little bit funky, a bit more melodious. Lyrically, she’s pretty serious. Not that you’d know this from the concert — lack of vocal clarity and all — but the CD’s lyric sheet makes it clear that Lauper and her co-writers are dealing with a lot of misery and trying to rise above it all. Topics include incest (“Lies”), racial strife (“A Part Hate”) and a back- alley abortion (“Sally’s Pigeons”). There’s a fair degree of romantic struggle.

Friday night, a few songs had their charm — the giddy, Motown-ish “Like I Used To” and the lilting, Celtic-flavored “Feels Like Christmas” among them — but too much of the new stuff came off as tepid. A case of forced joy. I couldn’t disagree when someone yelled, “Play the old stuff, will ya!”

Lauper — who plugged her upcoming movie “Life With Mikey” and meandered when she yakked — ignored that plea. She talked about writing a song that “answered the calling deep inside.” This turned out to be “Hat Full of Stars,” a look-back-with-longing-and-toughness song, a would-be towering ballad. It closed the set and almost replicated the dramatic resonance of her old hit “Time After Time.” But not quite.

Which brings us to the encores. First up, a barely recognizable “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” tarted up in reggae/hip-hop clothes. The implication: This song is too innocent, not close to me anymore. We will deconstruct the melody and not allow you any nostalgic fun. Then, the mawkish tearjerker “True Colors”, best remembered these days as a photo ad jingle, and “Change of Heart”, an agreable grabber that allowed the kept-on-a-leash band to kick it out, hard-rock style, during the coda. They closed with a false flash, a sparkling, climactic geyser to an ill-conceived show.

CYNDI LAUPER has grown up. Once in danger of becoming the ’80s answer to Betty Boop, New York’s multi-platinum sweetheart has returned from the wilderness with an album guaranteed to surprise. More than a comeback, “Hat Full of Stars” (Epic) is easily her best effort, a smart, passionate work that adds a new toughness to the charming pop sparkle of old.

Lauper’s escape from the purgatory of nostalgia revives a career that’s barely flickered over the last few years. The 1988 movie “Vibes” bombed, while her 1989 album, “A Night to Remember,” fell way short – artistically and commercially – of its two smash predecessors. Since then, she’s been practically invisible, apart from news of her 1991 marriage.

In the liner notes, Lauper says “Hat Full of Stars” is her story. If so, she’s been though hell: a sharp contrast to the giddy optimism of her younger days. The woman who chanted “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” almost 10 years ago now tackles such sobering matters as domestic violence and mental cruelty without a flinch. Writing with a host of collaborators, including old pals Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian of the Hooters and country star Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Lauper sounds like someone who’s learned bitter truths the hard way.

The funky uptown bounce of “Broken Glass” can’t soften her tale of abuse by a brutal lover, while the melancholy title track simmers with angry regret over a failed relationship. In less sensitive hands, the delicate “Sally’s Pigeons” might be cheap melodrama, but Lauper brings a touching, unadorned sincerity to this account of a friend’s death from an illegal abortion.

So much naked anguish would be hard to stomach if Lauper weren’t still an irresistible performer who sings her heart out, however bleak the situation. Producing or co-producing every track, Lauper displays an unerring instinct for catchy touches, from the gritty grooves of “Dear John” to the breezy “Like I Used To,” which combines a rousing declaration of independence (“Won’t take your crap”) with echoes of the Temptations’ “Beauty Is Only Skin Deep.” Only the corny “Who Let in the Rain” fizzles – although it would probably suit Whitney Houston just fine.

She may never recapture her dizzying chart success of the mid-’80s, but Cyndi Lauper’s got more important things to worry about now. Whether “Hat Full of Stars” sells 5,000 or 5 million copies, she oughta be proud.

Murder, kidnapping, and a car crash bring together a theme-park mermaid/aspiring actress (Cyndi Lauper), a would-be golf pro (David Keith), and a streetwise kid (Johnny Pinto) who are making their way from Florida to Manhattan. The actors were not exactly prepared for their roles. To do her underwater mermaid scenes, Lauper had to learn to swim. Says costar Keith, “she certainly looked adept at it, and she was underwater with girls who do it for a living.” Keith, meanwhile, had to learn to play golf. ” I got to where I could hit it alright with the irons,” he says, ” I still slice pretty badly with the driver.”

Nobody ever accused Cyndi Lauper of doing things the traditional way – yet most girls who just want to have fun, also just want things to be beautiful when they get married.

And at 3 o’clock yesterday at the 205-year-old Friends Meeting House at 15th St. and Rutherford Place on Stuyvesant Square, singer Lauper, 38, not only had fun getting married to actor David Thornton, she had a ball.

The Friends Meeting House, a Quaker house of worship, has been the scene for many non-traditional wedding ceremonies. Lauper mixed the traditional with the outrageous, the touching and the hilarious.

Little Richard, who at one time gave up rock ‘n roll to become a minister – and still is one – performed the ceremony. Patti LaBelle sang “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and Cyndi’s grandma served as the maid of honor. The vows, written by Lauper, Thornton and the Little Big Man – a/k/a the Rev. Penniman – were quite beautiful, touching and yes, still fun.

After the ceremony, which was closed to the news media, the wedding party and guests loaded into a double-decker bus parked outside, then headed downtown to an Italian restaurant on the Lower East Side to, well, have fun.

Didn’t the neighbors get suspicious seeing a double-decker parked outside the Quaker Meeting house? Hardly – the Meeting House is attached to the Friends Seminary School and buses are a common sight, bringing students back and forth on school trips.

Unlike the media circus created by the Liz Taylor/Larry Fortensky wedding, this one was dignified and quiet, with both the guest list and the location kept under wraps. Guests included Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) and “Barton Fink” star John Turturro. The bride chose not to wear a Cyndi kind of outfit, but something more traditional – a white satin bustier party dress in which she looked astonishingly beautiful. Groom Thornton wore a traditional tuxedo.

The couple met about two years ago while filming a movie, “Off And Running,” that hasn’t been released yet. And they certainly were.

Make just a few, slight changes–oh, add a Laura Ashley dress, tone down the lipstick–and Cyndi Lauper could walk unnoticed through the sedate hallways of Hartford’s insurance giants.

The new-look Lauper–the short, straight cut of her auburn hair, a loose-fitting black outfit–was a sight to behold as she frenetically danced near an old poster of herself Tuesday night at Toad’s Place.

No more tangerine hair, no more bracelets up to her elbows, no more eyeglasses borrowed from Grandma. And thank goodness, no more wrestlers.

But her strongest asset–her astounding voice–remains, and Lauper used it well Tuesday as she cruised through a generous, energized two hour set.

Slowly edging toward the front of the stage, Lauper and her five-piece band opened with several percussion-heavy numbers that featured a Latin flair.

The new tunes can be heard on an upcoming album, which the 37-year old New Yorker, from the Queens neighborhood of Ozone Park, said could be released in May.

She dropped a solid “I Drove All Night” into the segment and, backed by two drummers, took command of the stage.

Overloaded with musical zeal, the band jammed as she bopped back and forth at a ferocious pace that must require pre-concert carbo-loading.

Pit-stopping for a towel and bottled-water break, Lauper offered a slower version of “All Through the Night” before a slightly chaotic “Boy Blue.” While the music teamwork was well orchestrated, the song featured a few unneeded primal screams from Lauper.

From there on, however, Lauper and bandmates offered a range of tunes that should propel them to even wider audiences. Her bouncy, sweet vocals glided through a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On ?”

Pausing to ask in her trademark voice, “What note, babe?” Lauper then took up the New Orleans standard, “Iko, Iko.” Using what looked like kitchen forks, Lauper played a metallic washboard hung from her neck.

From that easy, crowd-swaying tune, they were ready to rock. Lead by an empowering bass performance, the band shined through “Dancing With a Stranger,” with Lauper, clutching a pink tambourine, bopping all over the place.
More frenetic bopping followed, naturally, during “She Bop,” as well as “Yeah, Yeah.”

Lauper slowed for the deftly delivered ballad “Unconditional Love,” sometimes closing her eyes to concentrate as she sang. She immediately resumed the pace of powerful, tension-laced rock tunes, including the mega-hit, “Money Changes Everything,” which closed the set.

By placing the songs so close together, Lauper displayed the impressive versatility of her voice and her stage presence.

Through two encores, Lauper and her bandmates offered six more tunes, including, “Time After Time,” “Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China),” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and “True Colors.”

She may sing like an animated puppet, and wear all her outrageous wardrobe at once, but Cyndi Lauper’s loyal fans wouldn’t have her any other way. And that, as she tells Fiona Cumberpatch, is just as well…

For someone who claims she doesn’t think she’s very attractive, pop singer Cyndi Lauper is doing a great job at covering it up. She poses for the camera, arms wrapped seductively around her body and heavy-lidded eyes almost closed. At a word from the photographer she pouts sulky red lips and purrs into the lens with all the sexy confidence of a professional pin-up.

But once the lights are switched off and the show time’s over, she can still insist “I really don’t feel comfortable having my picture taken. I think it’s because I don’t look like those gaunt models in the glossy magazines”. It’s not the kind of confession you’d expect from a dollar millionairess whose trademark is dressing to excess. But Cyndi’s deadly serious.

Lowering her little-girl voice (she says poy-son for person and noo yoik for new york) she confides earnestly, “I have to be careful about the way I dress. You know, if I wear skirts of a certain length then they make my legs look like sticks. They really do”.

And when she’s forced to tone down that distinctive Lauper image to avoid being recognized, she says she can hardly bear to look at her self in the mirror. “I think to myself – God you look so ugly! So I get my red lipstick out and put that on but then I look like I have big lips and no eyes so I put some eye make up on and then I’m back to looking like myself again! But….” she gives a big sigh, “I guess you should look at yourself and try to appreciate way you are”.

And the way she is, is unique. Since Cyndi first burst onto the pop scene in the mid eighties with her smash hit Girls just wanna have fun, her distinctive image has inspired hundreds of copies. Even her one-time rival, Madonna, liked the look so much she adapted it for herself. And while some may say Madonna did it with more style and success, Cyndi will always be the original to an army of fashion followers.

Not that Cyndi needs to feel threatened by anyone these days. With a new single, Primitive, and a film, paradise paved, currently in the making, she’s set to start the Nineties with a bang. At the same time she’s honest enough to admit that staying on top for the past five years hasn’t been easy.

“Success is a weird thing” she says rather sadly.” When you first make it, its great. But then you get people knocking you saying, “she can’t sing, she can’t act” and you need to be really strong to get through that”. Success might have come easier, Cyndi says now, if she’d conformed to her record company’s requirements. “They wanted me to change my hair. my make-up, my clothes. I had to say to them -I am Cyndi. I don’t change for no one and I do not fit into any category. So I guess it took me longer to find success than it takes some other people”.

And although, at thirty something, Cyndi reckons she’s a survivor, she confesses that the strain sometimes gets to her.” You go though a rollendi reckons she’s a survivor, she confesses that the strain sometimes gets to her.” You go though a roller coaster of emotions. Sometimes, when I’m very happy, I know that I’m going to come crashing down the next day. But I force myself to smile and get though it. And writing my songs and performing helps me to deal with it”.

She did, however, find happiness when teamed up with manager, David Wolf, who soon became her long-term lover. But the couple have recently split up after five years. Cyndi will say only “I loved David and he loved me. A part of us will always love each other but we just came to the end of the road. Onwards and upwards. That’s life, I suppose.”

Now Cyndi is throwing herself into her work. And admits that she likes to be involved in every aspect of it. “I write my own music, I think of the ideas for my videos. When my music is being mixed in the studio I go in there and get involved.”

Putting together that fantastic ragbag of a wardrobe is something she loves to do, too.” One of my best friends owns this second-hand clothes store called Screaming Mimis, where I used to work before i made it. Now she’s my stylist. She’ll find all these amazing things and I go in and look them over. When we get together it’s a try-on hell! In the states people like us are called rag pickers. That’s what we like to do and we’ve had some very special time together”.

If she hadn’t made it as a singer, says Cyndi, she’d probably have ended up making clothes for a living. But now, “I can’t have a sewing machine or I’d be up all night making things and I’d never get any work done. I can’t set eyes on two handkerchiefs without wondering what I could make out of them.”

If she has children, she says, she’d dress them in the same eccentric style. “I can just see myself putting vegetable dye on their hair and dressing them up crazy”, she giggles.

Not that a family is likely in the near future,” I’ve been busy for so long that there hasn’t been time. Maybe one day, I don’t think about it much now.”

For the moment, Cyndi’s happy with her career. She loves to travel and has just finished a tour which took in the more remote regions of Japan and Venezuela. “We traveled where no band has been before,” she says with a grin. “It was wild. My band said to me,” the next time you want to take some kind of vacation, do us a favour and go on your own!”

She gives a long stretch and yawns. “But there’s nothing like singing and doing music so I wouldn’t be likely to go far. Not for any crazy vacation.”

It was a polemic event. There were lots of national and international reporters, they were all impatient about Cyndi´s arrival because she arrived to the Intercontinental Hotel almost 2 hours later; the press coference took place in this hotel, although she stayed at Eurobuilding.

There were some problems about the translation, it was not so good, but the photographic session was brilliant! She wore a black overall at the beginning, then she took it off. During the conference she had a black dress with white dots and her hair was not black & white, but black & yellow.

Here there are some comments and headlines from some magazines and newspapers (sent and translated by Julio Pena):

Q: What do you know about Venezuelan and Latin music?

CL: Latin music is becoming popular in US. I love the latin rhythms. I love to mix them with pop music; I have met fabulous artist such as Celia Cruz and María Conchita Alonso.

“ULTIMAS NOTICIAS”, Newspaper

Cyndi Lauper disappointed us, we were waiting a tall, exuberant and eccentric woman, as we have seen her in the videos. Some people adviced that she was strict, noisy and even bad mannered. We actually found a small and sweet woman, very simple with sad eyes and a glamorous face. Indubitably she transforms herself on the stage!”

Singer sets return with ‘A Night to Remember’

A NOT-SO-FUNNY THING Happened to Cyndi Lauper on the way to completing her new album, A Night to Remember: She made a movie. It was called Vibes, and it was a real clinker. Perhaps most damaging to Lauper’s career as a singer, though, was the single she recorded for the film. After the two hit-packed albums, She’s So Unusual and True Colors, the song she recorded for Vibes, “There’s a Hole in My Heart (That Goes All the Way to China),” proved the first unequivocal flop of Lauper’s solo career.

“The movie had some repercussions,” Lauper says by way of explaining the two-and-a-half-year lapse between True Colors and A Night to Remember. Originally slated for release last fall, the album was pushed back while the singer reworked it, adding several new songs and remixing its original tracks. “The album did change in a lot of ways,” she says. Then, considering her desire to still make films, she adds, “That’s the last time I’ll take a part because of the part, hoping that the script will get better. It never does.”

Lauper was also deeply affected by a trip she made last fall to the Soviet Union as part of a contingent of American songwriters that included Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, her collaborators on the song “True Colors.” Far from home, the singer underwent a reaffirmation as an artist.

“You become in the profession of ‘being famous,’ as opposed to what you started doing in the first place, which is the music, the writing and the creation part of it,” she says. “I had lost touch with that because of all the business obligations. I didn’t feel like an artist anymore. So I went back to my roots. I’m not Russian, but I was thinking of the farthest place on the earth I could go. And I just stopped all the other things that I could’ve done, and I did that and went back to the writing part and the craft and got to mix with other writers.

“Russia is a strange place, because they want so much to create, and they really remember what it’s all about. We forget the writing and how great is is just to do what you love to do. Over there, it’s so hard to do what you love to do. For instance, videos are outlawed. These guys are dying to make videos. And there are a lot of underground bands that are really, really fantastic. The lyrics are prolitic, and they’re not like greeting-card songs, you know, which of course strikes a chord in me.”

Lauper is referrring to “True Colors,” which, after climbing to the top of the charts, was licensed by Kodak for film commercials. (She doesn’t own the song, penned by Kelly and Steinberg) The commercials “got to me.” She says. “But that wasn’t me. When I sang True Colors, it was strictly something about the inside of people. It had nothing to do with ‘Will you buy this product?’ And there’s a strange twist because we are on a business where you buy the product. I do something that I want to be universal and really strike a common chord that’s in all of us, then usually some big company comes along and says, “Hey, we wanna buy that.” So I always have a problem with that.”

The writing credits for A Night to Remember read like a who’s who of hit makers: Kelly and Steinberg co-wrote six of the album’s eleven songs either on their own or with Lauper and Christina Amphlett of the DiVinyls; Desmond Child (who was coauthored hits for Aerosmith and Bon Jovi); Franke Previte (who co-wrote tow of the hits from Dirty Dancing) and Diane Warren (whose latest hits is Elton John and Aretha Franklin’s “Through the Storm”) also contributed tunes. Backing musicians include Eric Clapton, bassists Bootsy Collins and T Bone Wolk, singer Larry Blackmon and zydeco accordionist Rocking Dopsie.

“It’s not enough to be yourself again,” says Lauper. “For me, anyway. If it’s just about growth and development, that’s not hard to do, ’cause you really have to grow and develop. I’m hellbent. I got this vision in my head, and I just have to get it out; I have to create it. So I’ll go out on a limb a little bit and do something a little more dangerous, because the result could be great.”