“As a kid, I heard a lot of sad stories about women.”

Those words appear early in Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir, which the pop superstar released in 2017. As she tells it, Lauper was especially distraught hearing stories in which her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt were each dissuaded or denied chances to pursue their individual dreams or opportunities — and all solely because of their gender. “I could never undo the wrong done…because of a ridiculous mentality that kept women back,” she wrote.

What she could do was to commit herself to changing that narrative, and to not let similar limits get in her way, particularly when it came to pursuing a career in music. Her drive was at least in part motivated by her mother, the Brooklyn-reared daughter of Catholic immigrants from Sicily.

“My mom loved art and music so much,” Lauper continued, “but she wasn’t allowed to accept a scholarship to a high school for voice because, my grandparents said, ‘Only whores go to school in Manhattan.'”

Naturally, given its cultural preeminence as the hub of America’s music industry, Cyndi Lauper would eventually make her way to Manhattan. Yet it took her more than a decade after leaving her childhood home in Queens to finally find success in the industry. Notably, her major breakthrough as a solo artist tested her feminist resolve, ultimately putting it in stark relief.

“I didn’t want to do the song at first because I didn’t think it was especially good for women,” Lauper says of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” which was written as a lighthearted bop by Robert Hazard. “And then I saw my grandmother’s, my aunt’s, and my mother’s faces in my head,” she writes in her memoir. “And I thought that maybe I could do something and say something so loud that every girl would hear — every girl, every color. And I said to myself, ‘Hell yeah, I’ll make an anthem! Maybe it’ll be something that will bring us all together and wake us up’…. I’d make it work for every poor sucker whose dreams and joys were dashed out.”

The 1983 hit became not only a left-field feminist anthem and a signature song for Lauper, it also became a defining song of the ’80s, inspiring a groundbreaking, campy music video that won an inaugural MTV Video Music Award. Two singles and less than a year later, Lauper would do it again, registering another ’80s-defining, slyly feminist pop anthem, “She Bop,” a subversive, innuendo-laden ode to masturbation, which inevitably broached the topic of female pleasure and sexual liberation, fueled by an even campier and downright zany music video.

“She Bop,” the third of four consecutive Top 5 hits drawn from Lauper’s debut She’s So Unusual — the first for a female artist — also became an early and still rare example of a hit song whose lyrics include specific reference to gay culture. The opening lyrics are about flipping through a Blueboy magazine, which was considered a “gay version of Playboy” at the time.

“The mere appearance of such a magazine immediately establishes Lauper as a gay ally,” asserted a critic for the queer Video Closet Blog. Well, sure, although Lauper, in a brief, amusing YouTube post, sets the record straight, so to speak, acknowledging that that wasn’t her original intention. “I [went] to the magazine shop to find what was a female magazine. There was Playgirl but that was kind of, boring. And then there was Blueboy, which at that time, in my ignorance, I thought it was a women’s magazine. It was not.”

Less than two years later, Lauper really and truly did establish herself as a bona fide Queer ally, with not one but two LGBTQ-inspired songs from her sophomore album True Colors. There’s “Boy Blue,” an ode to a close friend, Gregory Natal, who had just died from AIDS-related complications.

The proceeds from the single were donated to AIDS-related charities — all remarkable given that this was early in the AIDS crisis at a time when there were precious few major artists willing to be so outspokenly supportive. “True Colors,” the album’s title track and first single, became Lauper’s second No. 1 hit before eventually making its way into the canon of gay anthems.

Written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, the lyrics and message of “True Colors” grabbed Lauper on first hearing, she told The AV Club in a lengthy song-by-song exposition published in 2011.

“On a very personal note, it was a very healing song, so I sang it for me and for all of us who survived [Natal],” she said. The song would go on to inspire Lauper to produce and perform a series of same-named fundraising concerts featuring LGBTQ and LGBTQ-supportive artists in 2007 and 2008, as well as establish what is now called True Colors United, a charity and advocacy group focused on LGBTQ youth homelessness.

In 2022, Lauper got emotional performing “True Colors” as the special guest at the White House for the signing ceremony of the Respect for Marriage Act. Towards the song’s end, Lauper, who sang as well as played the dulcimer, went dramatically silent, pausing to raise her right fist and then waiting for the audience to follow suit. It was a powerful show of solidarity that led to everyone singing in unison the final refrain, “You’re beautiful, like a rainbow.”

No doubt the song will serve as an emotional highlight during Lauper’s upcoming tour, which includes a stop at Capital One Arena on Sunday, Oct. 27. Per the tour announcement, the “Girls Just Want to Have Fun Farewell Tour” promises to be “a unique show [connecting] her hits with the visual art she loves” through collaborations with “groundbreaking artists of various genres,” including Yayoi Kusama, Daniel Wurtzel, Sonia Delaunay, Reza Dolatabadi, Refik Anadol, and fashion designer Christian Siriano. “Each night of the tour,” the announcement continues, “Lauper will perform immersed in their creations [for] a one-of-a-kind experience to celebrate with her fans.”

The tour will find Lauper headlining shows at arenas for the first time in decades. “I’m strong now, but I don’t know what I’m gonna be like in four years,” the 71-year-old said in a recent interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Lauper further elaborated on the rationale behind the tour during a recent Zoom interview with Metro Weekly, when she also shared her views on the upcoming presidential election, and shed some light on a few other things she’s got up her sleeves — including a planned return to Broadway as a composer, a decade after her Tony-sweeping success with Kinky Boots.

Lauper notoriously loses focus from time to time during interviews. On our Zoom at one point, she got distracted by one of her demanding pug puppies. A couple of other times, she wandered off on tangents that were hard to follow — something People referred to as “a stream of pure Lauper consciousness” in the magazine’s cover profile of Lauper in 1984.

Forty years later, Lauper took a verbal detour to Pioneertown after mentioning one upcoming tour stop highlight: “Oh, we’re playing in Palm Desert, come on! Do you ever go there? I’ve been there, obviously…. When I did Detour the album [in 2017], I shot the video to ‘The Funnel of Love’ in Pioneertown. Which isn’t really — I mean, it’s Americana, but it’s kind of television Americana…. All the old Westerns were shot there, so it was kind of interesting. I kept looking around to see if there were remnants of Bonanza.”

METRO WEEKLY: Tell me about the tour that you’re about to embark on, billed as a farewell.

CYNDI LAUPER: Well, I’m excited. It’s going to be a really beautiful-looking tour. I am collaborating with many artists. Christian Siriano is making me a few things, and so is Jeffrey Mack — so it’s a visual thing. I have a wonderful band, [but] I haven’t done this kind of a bucket list show. I’ve always loved performance art. And this will be the closest to it I’ve gotten in years. I mean, aside from the cuckoo gay pride stuff that I used to try and do. I’m excited that Amanda Shires is going to come and play as our special guest in D.C. She’s really great.

MW: Will she just serve as your opening act?

LAUPER: Well, the visual stuff is very specific, but the other stuff is more open. So there are different parts of the show. I don’t know if they want to, but I would like to incorporate [Shires] in my show a little bit.

MW: You mentioned this tour is a bucket list tour for you. In what sense do you mean that?

LAUPER: It’s a bucket list because I’m able to do more performance art, to really have the lights and the thing that I love: to collaborate with other artists. And to play 19 songs.

[A dog barks.] Oh, man. Excuse me one second, my dog. What? What, what, what, what? Okay. Here. Want to go out there? Go ahead. Why did you come to the door? There we go. Enjoy.

Yeah, that dog. She doesn’t sing. She watches dog videos, but my dog doesn’t sing. She barks. I want her to sing. Of course I want her to sing, but I don’t have a singing dog. I have a barking dog. I had a singing dog once, Joe, but that was a long time ago. And he only sang to “You Are My Sunshine.”

MW: And what’s her name?

LAUPER: These dogs? Lulu and Ping. There are two of them. They’re pugs. They’re Chinese, so they have Chinese names. Ping, it means peaceful, but she barks a lot. So we’re just hoping that the name will filter through her consciousness so she’ll become peaceful.

MW: Are they young?

LAUPER: Yeah, they’re two.

MW: A lot of energy then. Do they go on the road with you?

LAUPER: [Laughs.] Are you kidding? No. That would make everyone very, very upset. I could just see everybody’s veins popping out of their necks, “What do you mean you got the dogs?”

MW: Back to the tour. You mentioned the concert will feature roughly 19 songs. Will your two most recent covers projects, the blues-focused Memphis Blues and the classic country collection Detour be represented in the song list?

LAUPER: Well, I didn’t put Blues in this because there wasn’t enough room, but I may switch it around. Obviously, it’s stuff from She’s So Unusual and True Colors and A Night To Remember. And then there’s Hat Full of Stars and Sisters of Avalon and Bring Ya to the Brink. And one thing from Twelve Deadly Cyns — “I’m Gonna Be Strong” is in there. I went through streaming services to see what people listened to and what they might want to hear.

I just wanted to know what they enjoyed, what they liked. I didn’t want it to be too selfish. I can try and switch things here and there that would have similar visuals.

But I just figured, this is my farewell tour. I want people to be happy. Because right now, the way everything is, everybody’s very divided. So this was an opportunity to bring people together and make them really happy.

MW: Do you sing anything from Kinky Boots?

LAUPER: Maybe a piece of something. I got to see where I can put it, but maybe. You know me, sometimes I just stand there and sing a capella.

For the most part, I have a plan. But until I put the whole thing up, I won’t know exactly what the hell I’m doing and how.

MW: I understand since Kinky Boots, you’ve spent a lot of time focused on the musical adaptation of the 1988 blockbuster film Working Girl. How’s that coming along?

LAUPER: I’ve been working on Working Girl for the past 10 years. Well, on and off, but pretty steady from 2017, hence why I didn’t put any music out, because I’ve been working on this musical.

And it’s about to go to La Jolla in the fall of ’25, and come to Broadway in ’26. I’m writing with Rob Hyman, because it’s set in the ’80s, so I’m writing with him, with Sammy James Jr. from Mooney Suzuki. And Salt from Salt N’ Pepa wrote a rap that’s in one of the songs, too. So it’s really ’80s. I just wanted it to have authenticity.

When the opportunity came to do this tour — because again, I kept putting it off, putting off touring. Just how long can you schlep around the world, packing, unpacking, and this and that? This will be the last time, so I can say goodbye to everybody, and thank them, and make it as much of a party as I can for everyone, so that everyone can feel part of it.

MW: Earlier this year you also released a documentary about your life and career, Let the Canary Sing.

LAUPER: Well, that was an Alison Ellwood project — it was just about me. But I was told, “Oh, you should do a documentary.” And I wasn’t keen on it until I saw [Ellwood’s] Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time. I thought it was such a compelling film, I was like, “Well, why not work with an indie filmmaker?” She’s a wonderful filmmaker. And I wanted a woman to tell my story, because I’m a woman. You get that whole thing there.

One thing led to another, and everybody was like, “How about a farewell tour?” And then, I really started to think about what I would like to do. I haven’t even done something like this in ages. Like, ’86 maybe was the last time. I sold out Madison Square Garden. I’m fucking thrilled. And I want to make people happy and elated, and laugh and sing — you know they’re going to sing.

It’s going to be fun. Of course, I’m still putting it together, so I don’t even know what the final thing will be, but if it’s close to what we plan, it’ll be pretty great.

MW: How are you feeling about the state of politics right now, less than a month away from the elections?

LAUPER: Well, I’m very hopeful. I’m very hopeful because we have a choice, and that’s a big deal. And it is a possibility for women, finally, to stand up for one of our own. Remember The Handmaid’s Tale? Well, we can kind of come more into that if it makes certain people feel good about “small government” making rules [about] our bodies, in our bedroom. That’s not small government, baby. That’s dictatorship. And for me, I like having a choice of freedom of thought and religion, which means to believe or not to believe, because that’s what our country was founded on: religious freedom.

Not that we did so great with the Native Americans or the kidnapped people from Africa that we brought over and enslaved, but I think that we have an opportunity to step forward and grow together. Because let me tell you, we’re all immigrants — unless you are a Native American — then you’ve got a different story to tell.

I think together we can make things better. We can make better healthcare for people. We can make better education. Banning books? That’s what the Nazis did.

It’s an opportunity. And there are certain organizations [where we can] learn about what is on the ballot: Go to www.vote411.org. Or if you have trouble with anything, you can go to www.WhenWeAllVote.org, and they can direct you to wherever it is you need to go.

And with WhenWeAllVote, you can look up the different people that are running. You can find out what they voted for, and see who can be your voice, who is going to stick up for you. And you can find your community. Because if you look at Iran in the ’70s, those girls dressed like us, and then, look at what’s going on now.

MW: I just can’t believe the polls are showing the presidential race as close as it is.

LAUPER: When you really look at what Trump is saying, he totally is unraveling. It’s not just dementia. It is more than unpresidential. It’s just unraveling. It’s just something wrong there. There’s a screw loose.

When he was president, the people kept trying to keep him away from the nuclear button so that we wouldn’t be in a major problem. And that’s who you’re going to vote for? Hey, good luck with you. I’m not. I’m definitely for Harris. And Walz. He talks plain and simple to me. He was a teacher. And he was a coach. And he was in the military, too, right?

MW: Yeah, he was the advisor to the Gay Straight Alliance for kids at the high school where he taught and coached.

LAUPER: As a human being, if you have some kind of heart that beats in your chest, you can’t ignore when young people, when children, are suffering. So you want to have an alliance where people can talk. And you need to hear other people talk.

You ask me who I’m voting for? I don’t want The Handmaid’s Tale. Okay? That’s what we’re looking at. I would like to see women have equality. And I think, if everybody had equality, we would be able to all participate and make it a stronger country, as opposed to, oh, just these people, not those people. And if you’re going to get all upset about immigrants, look back three generations and look at your own grandparents, or your great-grandparents, and why they came here. Because everybody’s an immigrant.

MW: I say it’s also about damn time we had a woman president.

LAUPER: Well that’s another thing. Who really runs the households? Women. We’ve had everything else. We need a woman. And I think Harris is a very strong woman — smart, and she’s tough. And I think that’s what we need.

But I’m not going to tell you that’s who you should vote for. I’m going to tell you that you should do your research before you vote, and figure out who speaks for you. And figure out, if you’re a parent, if you want your kid to be ruled by a government that tells her when she can have a baby and when she can’t have a baby. It just goes into a big, big problem for me.

MW: Metro Weekly does serve the gay community, so it’s very clear who our readers should vote for.

LAUPER: Well, there’s that. Yeah, there’s that. But you still want people to feel that they are speaking their voice. We are lucky to be able to have a vote. Not every country has that. And the last vote was counted more than any vote in the whole freaking country, ever. I’ve been around a long, long time. And that was check, double-check, check, double-check, check, double-check.

But because of AI and because you can manipulate anything now, you probably don’t even read real news. I look at the Associated Press, because they’re a wire service — they only do the news. It’s not opinion. Everything else is kind of opinionated and editorial, and I’m not interested anymore. I just want to know what happened, when it happened, and that’s what happened. And that’s it. Because everything’s so tainted.

MW: On another topic, has there been any progress on the project that was announced in development at Netflix prior to the pandemic for Netflix, one being led by Jane Lynch, which she described as a “Golden Girls for today.”

LAUPER: I loved that project. Jane Lynch and Carol Leifer. And that’s what happens when you start, and you have a project, and you have an idea, and either it goes or it doesn’t.

I just did The Horrors of Dolores Roach in 2022, and I thought that was fantastic, because it was funny, it was scary. And the head writer, Aaron Mark, was really great, and his team was great. But it came, it went. The whole pandemic did a lot.

MW: I know this is explicitly billed as a farewell tour, so we shouldn’t expect more concerts from you. Beyond new music to come in Working Girl, what are the chances for new pop music from you down the line?

LAUPER: I’ll definitely keep writing, but what happened was Broadway was a place to get my music heard. Then I started writing about the stories that were in the show, and it’s not me. It’s the stories that are in the show, and you have to serve the story first, not you.

But I enjoy that. And there’s quite a bit of music for Working Girl. But I probably will do something. There are so many wonderful artists to collaborate with. That’s another bucket list. I’d like to do it before I’m dead, right?

MW: Anyone in particular you’d want to single out as top picks for collaboration?

LAUPER: It’s not good if I put it down and I don’t ask them [first], but there are tons of people to collaborate with. There are wonderful artists out right now and there are wonderful singers. And I just think that singing is so needed. Music is so needed.

Sometimes, you feel like, oh, the music industry is so tough. It is. But people still need music. They need to be able to sing. They need to be able to have a playlist that they can cook to and laugh and have a good time while you’re doing stuff. Music is a great elevator of mood. It’s a great healer. And we need more singers, we need healers.

MW: I know you’ve previously championed Chappell Roan.

LAUPER: Well, why not? She’s a great woman artist.

MW: Are there any other young artists you find inspiring?

LAUPER: Sabrina Carpenter. She’s really great. I was watching her in an interview, and she started talking about this other woman, Hemlocke Springs. She’s really cool.

I’m lucky enough that [my tour will feature] Rêve, Lu Kala — she’s fantastic. Amanda Shires — that one can sing and play. Forget about it. It’s awesome. And then Elle King, I love that girl. And Emily Estefan, Aly & AJ, Tones and I. And Daya, and Trixie Mattel. Come on, all these wonderful artists. And I can’t even believe that I get to have them as special guests. They’re really wonderful.

Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour arrives in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Oct. 27, with doors at 7 p.m., at Capital One Arena, 601 F St. NW. Tickets are $29.50 to $179.50, or start at $309 for the Time After Time VIP Premium Ticket Package including commemorative VIP laminate and lanyard, exclusive tour VIP poster, access to an exclusive message from Lauper, specially designed VIP gift item, and dedicated VIP entrance. Visit www.capitalonearena.com or www.cyndilauper.com.

The 23-date North American leg of the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour kicks off with two dates in Canada, Friday, Oct. 18, at Montreal’s Bell Centre, and Sunday, Oct. 20, at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, followed on Thursday, Oct. 24, at Detroit’s Fox Theatre, Saturday, Oct 26, at Boston’s MGM Music Hall at Fenway, and Wednesday, Oct. 30, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. For a full list of shows and dates, visit www.cyndilauper.com.

Let The Canary Sing is available for streaming on Paramount+. Visit www.paramountplus.com.

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