Monday June 21, 2021 “True Colors” Cyndi Lauper
June is Pride Month so let's spend some musical time with songs that celebrate diversity.
Cyndi Lauper rose to fame in 1983 with the release of She's So Unusual, an album that provided a showcase for her strong but girlish voice and her thrift-shop-genius personality. The album made her an overnight star and a darling of MTV, spawning two major hit singles, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "Time After Time".
Lauper's big hit “Time After Time” was co-written by Rob Hyman from the band the Hooters and was actually an afterthought, almost a throwaway for the album as it was written, produced and recorded using studio time that Lauper had booked but not used.
Today’s song, “True Colors” has become a standard in the gay community. In various interviews, Lauper elaborated that the song had resonated with her because of the then death of her friend, Gregory Natal, from HIV/AIDS and Lauper would go on to co-found the True Colors Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating LGBT youth homelessness.
Stay safe and well...and Cyndi Lauper wrote all fifteen of the songs in the successful broadway musical Kinky Boots which won six Tonys, including best musical score, but she did not write “True Colors”.