She's So Unusual

After Blue Angel, Lauper worked in shops and sang in local clubs. David Wolff became her manager and got her signed to Portrait Records in the spring of 1983, and she began recording her first solo album. Chertoff had been collecting songs, and the sessions drew on his college friends Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian of the Hooters. Pitchfork's Arielle Gordon wrote that Lauper wanted a fusion of synth-pop with reggae and ska. The covers included Money Changes Everything by the Brains, All Through the Night by Jules Shear and Prince's When You Were Mine.

Lauper balked at first at Girls Just Want to Have Fun, then rewrote it with backing vocals from the Brill Building songwriter Ellie Greenwich. She Bop came out of a push from Stephen Lunt, who insisted that no other girl had done this before. When Chertoff asked for one more original song, she went to the studio with Hyman, who had a four-chord piano progression, and the result was Time After Time. The cover was shot by Annie Leibovitz on Henderson Walk in Coney Island in the summer of 1983, with Lauper in a red prom-style dress from Screaming Mimi's, the vintage shop where she had worked. It won the art director Janet Perr the Grammy for Best Recording Package in 1985.

The album entered the Billboard 200 at number 193 in the week dated 24 December 1983 and peaked at number four on the chart dated 2 June 1984. It stayed on the chart for 77 weeks, was certified seven times platinum in the United States and has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. It reached the top three in Australia and number five in Japan. Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone praised Lauper's voice on release. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic later called it one of the great new wave and early MTV records. It placed 494th on Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums and 184th on its 2020 update. A 30th anniversary edition appeared in 2014, and in 2013 Lauper toured the album in full.