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At Last

Cyndi Lauper

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Dec 08, 2009
Category: Rock

Our 7.75-year-old has learned how to download from iTunes. She’s willing to spend her tiny allowance on music, which means that, every week, two new samples of Disneyrock enter our home. It’s clever pop — not awful stuff at all. If I have any gripe with Selena Gomez and Mitchel Musso and Miley Cyrus, it’s the sameness. Bottom line: I can’t identify a singer, not even by gender. 

Teddy Thompson is clearly not a late-life father of an only child, because he takes a much harsher view in the title song of A Piece of What You Need:
 
Is this what we really want,
Background music from a restaurant?
Spare me, It’s doing in my head
Drop dead gorgeous teen
Singing pages from her diary
So bad you’d kick her out of bed
 
It follows that Teddy makes a pitch for adult music:

Break down the stupid wall
Stop doing what you’re told
And don’t believe a thing you see
Red Light, drop that ball
Stop getting everything you want
And get a piece of what you need.
 
Well, alright then. Let’s have some Cyndi Lauper.
 
Those who tuned in to Cyndi Lauper at “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and tuned out immediately thereafter may well ask: Why her?
 
Thank you for asking.
 
Unlike the other female pop singer who made her debut in 1983 — you know: Madonna — Lauper has a growth curve to admire. Not commercially. Lauper was the first female singer to have four top-five singles released from one album, and that just doesn’t happen in the real world. Her growth is artistic. She took her four-octave range and her Betty Boop voice, selectively ditched her outer-borough accent, and made CDs that are all over the genre map.
 
But I didn’t know that Lauper had made a CD of oldies.
 
I just heard “Walk on By” on the radio.
 
This is not Dionne Warwick, bravely holding in her tears and presenting herself as almost healed when she encounters a former lover on the street. This is heartbreak, pure and total. Literally: Lauper can barely speak to her ex. “I just can’t get over losing you,” she sings, and every word testifies to that truth — she’s almost struggling to breathe. Watch and listen:
 

 
This total immersion into deep, dark emotion reminded me how much I’ve admired Lauper, so I invested $6.99 for At Last. It’s a checkered collection — “standards” and covers and a duet with Tony Bennett. The through line is her childhood in Queens: "Growing up, these songs were what my neighborhood was listening to. There was a beautiful tapestry of sound wafting out of backyard parties with Chinese lanterns. It was an extraordinary experience because as I was singing those songs I related back to those times and those people."
 
Let Lauper do her own convincing. Here is Stay”:
 

 
Here is “If You Go Away”:
 

 
And here she is, stepping into the territory of Eric Burdon and the Animals, with “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”:
 

I find originality and conviction in every song. And, okay, I know she’s a pop singer, but I almost feel it’s okay to use the word “artist” about her without irony.
 
To buy “At Last” from Amazon.com, click here.
 
To buy an MP3 download of “At Last” from Amazon.com, click here.