“I knew that music was opening up”: the album that changed Cyndi Lauper’s life
Cyndi Lauper defines the word “legend”. With a myriad of works spanning time, space, and genre, she really knows what it takes to make a hit and create a lasting legacy. Lauper is widely regarded as riding high at the top of a generation chock full of accomplished songwriters and musicians, a passionate LGBTQ+ activist, and is set to leave her career with a bag in the form of her hotly anticipated farewell tour.
Looking back on a life of power, ingenuity, and music, the ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ singer recognises the strides that have been made in society to make the industry what it is now. She also realises the significant impact that the music of her peers, as well as those she admires from afar, had in shaping her into a global icon. There was a special artist who embodied just that at a particular moment that shook up the trajectory of the landscape forever.
It was 1973, and Lauper was 20 years old. “I had been away at college, listening to a mix of bluegrass music, blues albums, and Buffy Sainte-Marie,” she told Pitchfork. When travelling back home, she turned the radio on, and suddenly, life felt forever changed: “They started playing Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living for the City’. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. It was the most amazing, brilliant thing.”
The album that ‘Living for the City’ came from, Wonder’s 16th record Innervisions, was captivating for a young Lauper, who would not start to make her mark on the music industry for another ten years yet. Its images of landscapes and people not only created further megahits for Wonder but gave the word an insight into the genius and visionary mind of a man who lacks the ability to see.
Although she wasn’t aware of the depths behind it in the moment, it was the intricacy of the songwriting that immediately struck Lauper when she first heard it, especially in relation to ‘Living for the City’.
“And talk about writing lyrics like a painting: You could see that sound,” she said. “I knew that life was changing when I heard ‘Living for the City’ — just the rhythm of it, and the story that he was telling was so real. I knew that music was opening up.”
Open up it did because, of course, Wonder only continued to climb to – and still maintains – stratospheric heights of stardom. Over time, Lauper would join him on that stage, a pioneer in her own right for women in rock and roll, with a whole string of accolades and achievements in tow. Despite the grandeur of it all, even the seemingly smaller moments came full circle – Lauper and Wonder have performed alongside each other on numerous occasions, most famously together as part of the lineup for celebrity charity aid single ‘We Are the World’ in 1985.
The status of icons like Stevie Wonder is confirmed in moments like Lauper’s story; you know something different has hit the world when it makes you sit up and listen and disrupt the way you think. What’s remarkable is that Wonder has managed to formulate an entire career of those, which proved inspirational to the likes of Lauper in creating their own. Although we might never have crossed the two before, ‘Time After Time’ may never have existed if ‘Living for the City’ hadn’t come before it. It’s a small world, after all.
