The first version of the hit was written by a man and Lauper didn’t like his perspective at all.
Cyndi Lauper’s most famous song is undoubtedly “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” (1983). However, the singer went through a long process before she and her team could get the song to sound good to her. In a newly released interview, the 69-year-old revealed that she found the first version “yawning and boring.”
Robert Hazard wrote the text, which is why it just didn’t fit Lauper. “It was written by a man and he wrote, ‘Hey, we’re lucky. They want to have fun. Here I am.” And that wasn’t the case for me at all because I’m a woman. I am not a man. And that was a problem,” she said in an interview.
The Making of Girls Just Want To Have Fun
So the Grammy, Emmy and Tony winner took matters into her own hands. Lauper and her team would then have broken down the song into its individual parts and rebuilt it. She was particularly taken with the sounds of modern music at the time. “This big gated one [Effekt in der Musikproduktion] Snare drum, the sound of the street, the new bebop, the kids dancing on the cardboard box, that sound, that drum, that snare, that big trashy drum. How could you ignore that? It just had to be in the music. It was part of the environment.”
In addition, the singer tried the song in a variety of keys. “She [ihre Band] wanted to kill me. They didn’t see it coming,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s like cooking. You never know if there’s too much pepper in it until you try it, right?” she added. So Cyndi Lauper added her musical spice to her dish called “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” until she liked it. Of course, there would also be regressions in such a process, according to Lauper. In the meantime, she even tried to make a reggae piece out of her hit.
In the interview, Lauper also commented on the creation of the music video for the track. From the beginning it was important to her to give every little girl who sees the video the feeling of being seen. So she invited all her friends “who looked like New York”. Her mother can also be seen in the clip.
Cyndi Lauper toured with Rod Stewart in March and April 2023. She played a total of five concerts in Australia and New Zealand. New dates are not yet known. Her latest studio album DETOUR was released in 2016. In the same year she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.