“It just trained my ear differently”: Cyndi Lauper’s favourite song by The Beatles
If you were a child old enough to have lasting conscious memories from the 1960s, there’s a fair chance you’ll recall being swept up in Beatlemania to a degree. You may have been trying to resist it at the time, but The Beatles and their obsessive fandom were virtually impossible to evade, and on their first few trips to the US, they were swarmed by rabid crowds of fans, both young and old. A handful of those would have gone on to pursue music as a direct result of witnessing their descent upon the States, and among those was Cyndi Lauper.
Best known for songs such as ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’, ‘Time After Time’ and ‘True Colors’, Lauper was part of a pop revolution of her own during the 1980s, and her progressive politics and advocacy for LGBTQ+ groups during the period was what made her an icon for many. However, it was the inescapable influence of The Beatles that kick-started her obsession with becoming a performer, and she recalled from her earliest years that they had a profound effect on her.
Lauper encouraged her sister to drive her to a location where she knew the cars ferrying the Fab Four from JFK airport would be travelling on during one of their earliest visits to the US, and the singer still laments to this day that she missed her moment to catch a real glimpse of her heroes. “I had my eyes closed, and then all of a sudden, I open my eyes and saw the backs of their heads. I said ‘what a jerk, what did I do, I missed them!’”, she recalled on her 2025 episode of Desert Island Discs.
This tale, of course, preceded her pick of the Beatles song that she would take with her on a desert island, and as someone who would have been ten years old when they released their first US album, Introducing… The Beatles, it would have been a phenomenon that followed her throughout her teenage years and into early adulthood. Growing up with the music of a particular act is often something that sticks with people forever and helps create parts of a person’s identity, but it’s most frequently the earliest memories that remain the fondest.
Given this, Lauper’s choice of Beatles song for the broadcast was their smash hit, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, which was released in late 1963 to acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. As one of the songs that the band performed during their iconic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, many Americans who recall watching the broadcast will distinctly remember this song and have had a lasting impression left by it.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that Lauper’s favourite song is an early release of theirs, and her passion for The Beatles’ music was something that she and her sister shared. “My sister and I, like every kid, we were acting out The Beatles,” Lauper revealed to host Lauren Laverne, further adding what the band taught her in terms of musicianship. “I learned harmony, and I harmonised with my sister. Ellen had to be Paul, I always had to be John, and that was fine. But I learned the harmonies, and it just trained my ear differently.”
Given that it’s one of her favourite songs of all time, the frustration at not having her motorway sighting of the group as a youngster must still be frustrating for Lauper, although a more recent encounter helped her overcome that. Concluding, “I was at my dentist recently, and I turned around and there’s Paul McCartney, right behind me. I didn’t know what to say. I was at the dentist, so I said, ‘Nice teeth.'”
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