Cyndi Lauper: ‘I Had To Wrestle My Way’ Onto First Album

Cyndi Lauper spoke recently about what it was like to be a woman in music in 1982, saying she had to put up a fight against the record label to even be able to sing her own songs on her debut album.

The interview came just before Lauper’s induction into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame on Thursday, and after a career that has spanned 3 decades, Cyndi said she was so honored to be included in a group along with Willie Dixon, Linda Perry, and two of the members of the Grateful Dead. In the beginning, Cyndi said, the record label wanted to provide her with songs to sing while she took their direction on how to be a star.

“I had to wrestle my way onto my own album. They said, ‘You should just stand there and sing. You should dress like Katrina and the Waves,'” Lauper said.

Over the course of her career, Lauper has been praised and ridiculed almost in equal measure, with some unable to understand her style…especially when she first burst onto the scene in the early days of MTV. But the brightly-coiffed singer has never seemed too concerned with the opinions of others or with being accepted by everyone. Acceptance is something she wrote about for the musical Kinky Boots, for which she won a Tony in 2013, and she told People recently that the Broadway show is very much about becoming your own person.

“When kids are little, they try to be exactly like their dads. But in the end, all little boys have to grow up and be the men who they are supposed to be, not the image of what they think their fathers want,” Lauper said. “I’m Not My Father’s Son,” for instance, “is “about unconditional love and about being true to yourself. Not everyone has an ideal relationship with their fathers, and sometimes there is some stuff you can’t fix, but even Lola, whose dad rejects him, was able to find some closure with his father in the show.”

Cyndi Lauper made headlines recently when Family Guy creator sang several of her songs in the voices of his characters during an appearance on the Graham Norton Show. The video quickly made the rounds across the web, with many fans immediately declaring their favorite to be Stewie singing “Time After Time.”

[Photo courtesy YouTube]