Cyndi Lauper

Queens and Blue Angel

Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper was born in Brooklyn on 22 June 1953 and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. At 12 she began writing songs on an acoustic guitar her sister gave her, and she later took art classes at Johnson State College in Vermont. In 1978 she met the saxophonist John Turi and formed Blue Angel, who signed to Polydor and released one album in 1980. It sold poorly and the band broke up. After the band broke up she spent time working in retail stores and singing in local clubs. In 1981, while she was singing in a local New York bar, she met David Wolff, who took over as her manager. With his help she signed to Portrait Records, a subsidiary of Epic, in the spring of 1983.

She's So Unusual

She's So Unusual came out on 14 October 1983. It was recorded between May and August at Record Plant in New York with Rick Chertoff producing. Chertoff brought in two friends from the Hooters, Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian, and gathered songs by others, among them the Brains, Prince and Jules Shear, alongside Lauper's own co-writes. She rewrote parts of Girls Just Want to Have Fun, a Robert Hazard song, and it became the lead single, reaching number two in the United States.

Time After Time, which she wrote with Hyman late in the sessions, gave her a first American number one. She Bop reached number three and All Through the Night number five, making her the first woman with four top-five Hot 100 singles from one album. The video for Girls Just Want to Have Fun won the first Best Female Video award at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and she took Best New Artist at the 1985 Grammys. The album peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. Arielle Gordon of Pitchfork wrote that it helped usher in an electronic era for popular rock. In 2019 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

After the debut

True Colors followed on 15 September 1986. Lauper had planned to work with Chertoff again but changed her mind, and produced it with Lennie Petze. Its title song, written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, spent two weeks at number one, and True Colors became a gay anthem that gave its name to the charity she later started, True Colors United. A Night to Remember (1989) was reworked after the film Vibes flopped. Its single I Drove All Night reached number six, but the album sold less than its predecessors and she joked that it should be called A Night to Forget.

Hat Full of Stars (1993), co-produced by Junior Vasquez, took on abortion, racism, spousal abuse and incest. It drew favorable reviews and stalled at number 112. She went on to record a covers album, At Last (2003), the blues record Memphis Blues (2010), which topped Billboard's blues chart, and the country album Detour (2016). In 2013 she won the Tony Award for Best Original Score for the musical Kinky Boots, the first woman to win the category alone.

Farewell

The documentary Let the Canary Sing, directed by Alison Ellwood, reached Paramount+ on 4 June 2024. Lauper played the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury on 29 June 2024 and began her Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour in Montreal that October. The tour ended at the Hollywood Bowl in August 2025. On 8 November 2025 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Chappell Roan, who said Lauper redefined what a pop star could look like and sound like. Lauper performed True Colors, Time After Time with Raye and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun with Avril Lavigne, and told the audience that she stands on the shoulders of the women who came before her.