Cyndi Lauper gives advice to Christina Aguilera

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Cyndi Lauper: Yesterday Once More

Her latest disc shows her true colors by recreating classic tunes from the '60s. She talks about the art of singing and gives advice to Christina Aguilera.

by Jim Macnie

Some albums arrive out of the blue, offering an unexpected side of an established artist. That's the case with At Last, Cyndi Lauper's first disc in over five years and a charming little affair that finds the forever unusual New York pop star
showing us just how impressive her vocal chops are.

For baby boomers like Lauper, it's also a trip down memory lane. An array of songs from the '60s and before, it stretches from Dionne Warwick's "Walk On By" to Smokey Robinson's "You've Really Got a Hold On Me" to Sammy Kahn's "Makin' Whoopee" to The Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The latter track's title can be heard as intent behind Lauper's choice to interpret these classics. Though some arrangements stress the singer's well-known playful side, many are keenly deliberate spins on ballads forthright about their melancholy. At Last makes a case for Lauper being more than the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" girl.

Cyndi connected with VH1 to explain the variations of her many voices, how music affected her during her teenage years, and the advice she offered Christina Aguilera during a recent get-together.

VH1: I play this record in the office, and some people can't guess who is singing.

Cyndi Lauper: It sounds like me to me, but of course I know what my voice sounds like. In every song I've ever done, I used a different part of my voice. Like, "I Drove All Night" was completely different from "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "True Colors" was completely different from both of them, and "All Through the Night" was different, so ...

VH1: Is it a left-handed complement to say people don't recognize it?

CL: No! I think that's great. Using different parts of your voice keeps things fresh. I always try to use different sounds so that I'm always discovering myself.

VH1: The disc opens with Etta James's "At Last." Is singing such a dramatic song a frightening prospect?

CL: Well, listen, I sang it a cappella, too. I'm not scared of nothin'! Because no balls, no glory.

VH1: No guts no glory, that's it.

CL: "No guts, No glory." That's such a polite way to put it. I should say it like that. But in my neighborhood, they say "No balls, no glory," which is a little off-color and off-putting to some people. So, no guts, no glory. I'll remember that.

VH1: Were you ever embarrassed by your New York accent?

CL: Yeah, when I was a kid, when I was in college. When I was in [her first band] Blue Angel and I would do the radio promos, nobody would really play my voice, because my speaking voice was so weird.

VH1: You didn't take an elocution class to get rid of the accent?

CL: Well, later on I tried to, and then I realized that it didn't sound like me, so I thought, "Well, who the hell do I sound like?" So I figured, "Eh, forget it."

VH1: You're doing classic radio tunes from the '60s and '70s on the new disc. Do they take on a new resonance for you as a middle-aged person?

CL: No, not really. Y'know She's So Unusual was an interpretative record. And the only difference between that album and this one, as far as interpretations go, is She's So Unusual was more rock-oriented than this one. Those songs were not famous before I did them. These songs are. So you can really hear the interpretative ideas [at play].

VH1: You've said that in the early days, you went to a formal music school. What did it teach you?

CL: I could actually go there and work on something specific, instead of having someone else arrange rock songs for [me]. Which kinda always irked me. I never liked someone else arranging what I was gonna sing. I don't like being told what to do when I'm singing, because I want to feel free and find myself in some wonderful place that I could never imagine I could be in. I want to have the music take me somewhere, and you can't do that if you're a prisoner of someone else's way of thinking - a kinda "sing this here" and "do this there" thing. Then it becomes mechanical as opposed to free. It was in school I learned vocal strength and how to fix my voice, as well as natural singing, interpretation and jazz.

VH1: Where did you get the idea to make a cover album?

CL: I had a dream in 1987, after the True Colors tour. Count Basie came to me and told me how much he liked what was going on. He asked me why didn't I take an old song and try and make it new, like [Janis] Joplin did with "Summertime." And of course, as with all dreams, I started with my nonsense. "Well, I don't know ...How am I gonna find a piano player who will know how to play like Oscar Peterson and still understand the rock music?" He didn't say anything. He just kept playing and then he disappeared. When I started working on it, the songs dictated what they needed, and I chose songs from around the time that I was growing up. . . .


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VH1: When and where did you first hear "Unchained Melody"?

CL: That was always in a transistor radio on the beach, and older kids would hold hands and walk on the beach and you'd always hear the Righteous Brothers. My cousin Linda would play stuff like that. My music was more like the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Joplin, Hendrix, Cream. But they kinda bled in to each other. Like if you had a sister or a brother that was just slightly older, your music kinda blended.

VH1: What was the first 45 you bought with your own money?

CL: The Beatles' "P.S. I Love You." It was a dollar!

VH1: Fashion-wise, you're looking pretty fab on the album cover. Is that French-braid vibe part of who you really are?

CL: Well, each album cover is kinda like the voice of that material. So of course all of it has to come out of me. Unfortunately, I do look like myself.

VH1: Why do you say that? You look hot.

CL: Thank you. That's very sweet. Do I walk around in a cocktail dress all the time? No! No, I don't. And when I'm the [hockey] goalie on the pond with my son and my husband, I don't look like that at all. In fact, they call me "The Shovel."

VH1: Were you and Tony Bennett in the same room when you did "Making Whoopee"?

CL: Yup, we did it live. It was a whole different vibe for me.

VH1: You've said you always heard him in your home when you were growing up.

CL: Well, my mother listened to him, and so I left my socks in San Francisco, I left my shirt in San Francisco; I left everything in San Francisco after a while. Yeah, I heard that album quite a bit.

VH1: Describe the kind of nonchalance his vocal style is based on.

CL: I'd say he's very much a natural singer because he does not sing with headphones in the studio, so he is really manipulating his voice at its source. For me, it would be going through the headphones, through the board, through the mic, through the effects unit. Whereas he is not hearing any of that; he's changing it right at the source. Of course I did the same thing with him because this was our thing together. When in Rome...

VH1: What's this about you recording zydeco music?

CL: Yeah, I like zydeco music and I got to sing in French. Bad French, but French all the same. The thing about zydeco is that kind of French is not perfect. It's a little roughneck. I like roughneck style, and the fellow I was singing with was great. I was working with [guitarist-singer] Anne Savoy who does a lot of this stuff.

VH1: You interviewed Christina Aguilera last summer. What did you two chat about?

CL: I think she has a wonderful voice. There's a lot of things that make you want to grab these young ones and show them, things that nobody showed me, that I had to learn on my own. Sometimes you wish you could save 'em a lot of wear and tear. Just say, "Listen, focus on the magic of the moment when you're singing. All the other stuff is inconsequential." It doesn't mean a rat's ass when somebody says about what you look like, what you do or wear. What matters is what you feel like when you're singing - are you living in the moment?

VH1: Did Christina understand what you were driving at?

CL: Every time she went left I brought her back in. Because I'm singer, I would say, "When I heard the song you do with Lil' Kim, it sounded to me like... is that true? And if it is, where did you go?" And she'd go, "Well, yeah, I did try and feel like I was still standing in that place."

VH1: So what blanket advice would you give to all the young pop divas who constantly seem to be trying to top each other?

CL: Figuring out your individual creative process is important and the more you concentrate on that, the stronger you grow. Everybody has their 15 minutes of fame, and then you gotta decide if you're taking the long walk. If you're gonna take the long walk, then you better focus on what it is you're walking through and why. I took the walk and I'm still on that journey everyday. I get discouraged and inspired everyday. And that's just what it is, and if I had the ability not to get emotional about anything about it, I would feel better. I'm still working on it ...

VH1: Miles Davis made a famous cover of "Time After Time." Did you ever perform it with him?

CL: No, I didn't. I never met him because, honestly, I was worried that if he met me, he wouldn't like me, and he might stop playing the song! And he plays the song so well. His live version was great; he plays it so beautiful. It's inspiring. And I'll tell ya, I fought really hard to get to write the song. The problem was perception. If you had a great voice, you weren't a good writer. If you were a good writer, you weren't a good singer. So it was very hard to try and say, "Hey, listen, this is what I want to do." And I wasn't sleeping with nobody, except my manager, but I was sleeping with him first before he managed me!

VH1: Do you think that "Time After Time" will be like "At Last"? Will artists try to interpret it 20 years from now?

CL: Well, every year somebody does that song. I kinda wish that I could have been nurtured as a writer. But it didn't matter to me, because once Miles did "Time After Time," I felt like, "Wow, I really can write." Because while I was writing it, even though I was having a moment of inspirational spark there, I was still thinking in the back of my head, "Rat bastards! I hope that this becomes a classic so they never have to torture me again!" - which is not a positive thing to think. But the weird thing about my life is that it always turns around, like when people threw rocks at me because I was dressed funny. I went into a drugstore one time and the lady looked at me and said, "What is that you're wearing?" I was so angry - I said, "This? This is what your daughter's gonna be wearing next year!" And I left.

VH1: Go baby, go.

CL: That next year, everybody was wearing those clothes. Who would have thought that? So I had to take a step back and lose the anger. Like I said, I'm still on a journey.

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