When Cyndi Lauper first heard “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” she told her producer she would “never” sing that song.
On Tuesday, a documentary about Cyndi Lauper landed on Paramount+. “Let The Canary Sing” features insights on Lauper’s rocky New York City upbringing, her ascent to iconic ‘80s pop star and her enduring influence on culture.
Lauper also shares the backstory behind writing a few of her greatest hits — including the staple girlhood anthem “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
‘It was wrong for me’
On the brink of Lauper’s meteoric rise to pop stardom, she was taken by her producer, Rick Chertoff, to a Robert Hazard and the Heroes concert in search of inspiration.
Hazard, who wrote “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” performed the song. Chertoff hoped Lauper would cover it — but she hit him with a resounding “no.”
“No, not the way it was. It was wrong for me. It was a masculine story,” Lauper explains in “Let The Canary Sing.”
Lauper refused to perform the song as it was. She joined forces with her team of musicians and they recorded “demo after demo” but still, nothing felt right to the singer.
“For ‘Girls,’ we tried it this way, that way and I was like, this is not gonna work. It’s nothing special,” said Lauper.
Eventually, she “realized that these songs were arranged a certain way, we could create a sound to make them unique. I could use my voice in different keys and it would take on a totally different sound, a different personality.”
“All I wanted to do was make a modern record. I felt like we could arrange this thing and make it sound like such fun,” Lauper said, adding, “So I did it with sound — making it sound like every summer commercial, vacation sound, I ever heard.”
Lauper’s changes to the original tune proved successful. Her version of the song lived on the Billboards Top 100 list for 25 consecutive weeks.
“It was quite ahead of itself,” singer Boy George says in the documentary. “When you think about when girl power came along and there was this chick in, you know, early ‘80s going saying: ‘Girls wanna go out and party. Girls wanna have fun.’ It was a good message, I think, for kids and teenage girls particularly.”
Lauper on writing ‘Time After Time’
Directly after Lauper and her team wrapped up the recording of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” they were told the upcoming album needed another track.
They were on a time crunch to complete the album, they revealed in “Let The Canary Sing.” The plan was for Lauper to cover another song, but she insisted she write something original.
Lauper and Rob Hyman — a songwriter who worked closely with Lauper — got to work.
“I was struggling with my own anger and I was alone in my apartment,” Lauper says in the doc, adding, “but I felt a hand on my shoulder and I started thinking, ‘If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting.’”
With help from Hyman, she wrote “Time After Time” — a song that topped the Billboard Hot 100 and lived there for two weeks in 1984. It also received a Grammy nomination for song of the year.
“We wrote it in the studio as the door was closing on the project, and the budget I’m sure,” Hyman said.
Lyrics in the song’s first chorus were inspired by a conversation Lauper overheard her producer, Chertoff, having in the studio.
“I actually was listening to a conversation,” the singer revealed. “Rick was just standing there and his watch — he kept looking at his watch going, ‘Hm, my watch is going backwards. I’m not kidding. Look at this. The second hand’s unwinding. The second hand unwinds!’ And I’m thinking, ‘The second hand unwinds,’ what a great lyric.”
At 70, Cyndi Lauper announces ‘Farewell’ tour
It’s been more than a decade since Lauper has taken “a proper tour, that’s mine,” per The New York Times. So at 70 years old, the pop star is bringing her swan song to stage.
On Monday, Lauper announced her final tour — the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour — which sets sail in October 2024 in Montreal and spans North America, ending in Chicago in December. Tickets for the tour are currently on sale.
“I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” Lauper told The New York Times. “I want to be strong.”
Lauper hopes to used the 23-date tour as an opportunity to “thank everybody, say goodbye, celebrate with fans that have been so loyal and sweet,” the singer told USA Today.
“I’m going to include a piece of everything – (songs from) Blue Angel, ‘Shine’ – and combine art and moving visuals, use a lot of color and design,” she added. “I haven’t had a fun tour since ‘84, so now it will be the ‘24 fun tour!”
