Cyndi Lauper Greatest Hits Album
Tammara Freimark
Twelve Deadly Cyns...and Then Some is a greatest hits album by American singer Cyndi Lauper, released on August 22, 1994, through Epic Records. It contains a collection of singles from the singer's first four studio albums. It also contains three new songs: "(Hey Now) Girls Just Want to Have Fun", "I'm Gonna Be Strong" and "Come On Home", all of which were released as singles. To promote the record, the singer embarked on a worldwide tour. A video album was simultaneously released and contained music videos of fourteen songs.
After the release of Cyndi Lauper's third album A Night to Remember, in 1989, Epic was disappointed by its poor reception and the singer's declining in popularity in the charts and record sales. Fearing another failure, the Epic had the idea of releasing a compilation of the singer's greatest hits.[6]
A different greatest-hits album titled 13 Deadly Cyns was considered to be released in 1992 prior to the release of Cyndi's fourth album Hat Full of Stars, with a promo tape being released in the U.K. that year.[7] This version of the album included all singles (worldwide and regional) from Cyndi's first three albums (except "When You Were Mine", "Boy Blue" and "Primitive") as well as her 1992 single "The World Is Stone".[7] The shorter 7" studio edit of "Money Changes Everything" was included on this promotional release instead of the album version which would appear on the final release.
The idea was badly received by Lauper, who believed she had few albums and singles released so, in agreement with the label, decided that after her next album, which she was very hopeful about, it would be the right time to release a greatest hits.[8]
The singer selected the songs that would make the album, among the new tracks are "I'm Gonna Be Strong", which she previously recorded with the band Blue Angel, in 1984 and a new version of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" produced by the DJ Junior Vasquez.[9] The song uses the original lyrics of the 1983 song and includes a short section based on the 1974 hit song "Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone.[10] A music video featuring drag queens was shot to accompany this single and it aired heavily on television. It was also featured in the film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.[11] Also included and released as a single is a song titled "Come on Home" which Cyndi co-wrote with Jan Pulsford, who would work with Cyndi on much of her next album, 1996's Sisters of Avalon. According to the singer, the fact of including new songs on the record is because she believes that "music is a living thing" and for that reason she didn't want to make an album with old songs only, since a new audience was consuming her music at that moment.[9]
A notable omission of the compilation is the song "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough", soundtrack of The Goonies film,[12] and one of the singer's biggest hits, being top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100,[13] the song was avoided by Lauper due to the fights that marked the production of the song. Lauper stated in an interview with Matthew Rettenmund, she despised the song.Another track that was released as a single with a promotional music video and was not included is "Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China)", soundtrack to the 1988 film Vibes, starring the Lauper herself,[14] the track was included only in the Japanese edition of the disc due to problems with the division of royalties.[15] A video album was released in VHS, LaserDisc and later DVD and include an unpublished interview with Lauper and all the music videos from the international version of the disc. The video peaked at #12 on Billboard Top Music Videos.[16]
In his review of AllMusic, music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the album four out of five stars and said that although she returned to success with a collection of greatest hits, with the exception of the songs "True Colors" and "Change of Heart", the only songs by Lauper that have really been successful are on She's So Unusual, which he said was "a more consistent and fun album".[17] Robert Christgau gave the album a "C" rating and, like Erlewine, felt that Lauper's subsequent material (after She's So Unusual) was inferior.[20] The album sold 565,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.[21] As of 1997, the album has sold over 4 million copies worldwide.[4][5]
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There's an alternate world in which Cyndi Lauper was the biggest pop star of the last four decades. Yet oddly, as biodoc Let the Canary Sing suggests, that would have been a much more boring outcome.
Produced by Fine Point Films (and with London-based Dogwoof handling international sales), the fact that Let the Canary Sing is financed by Sony Music Entertainment might raise a red flag. After all, that it's the company behind the labels that released almost all her solo albums (since and including 1983's breakout She's So Unusual) suggests that this may be a soft-focus, greatest hits package.
That personal growth can only be shown by looking at the years before that hard-won self-awareness, and exactly why she wasn't interested in churning out True Colors for the fifth time. It's in looking at her childhood in Brooklyn, then moving to Queens where she acquired that distinctive accent that she spent years trying to hide. It's in putting together the pieces that lead to her being such a resolute ally to the LGBTQIA+ community when it was either a career-killer or often a little performative. It's about how she worked out that being a Janis Joplin soundalike (Lauper pays more tribute to voice coach Katie Agresta than any musical influence) would be a career-ending decision.
And it's also, subtly, about how the almost-cliched story of how her overnight success took years. It's not just in the music (could a teen really evoke the world-weary defeated cynicism required of "Money Changes Everything"?), or the time developing all those vocal idiosyncrasies and unlocking that four-octave range, but in having weathered so many storms by the time fame came that she knew how fickle and irrelevant it is. Even the title of the film is taken from an extraordinary court ruling that was the dawn after one of those storms. And after all those tempests, what Ellwood shows is that Lauper wasn't eroded by them, or calloused, but instead revealed.
So while Let the Canary Sing may be a sympathetic portrait, maybe that's more than OK because it's never sycophantic. There may not be any expos or surprise revelations, and Ellwood is deeply respectful of the areas of her home life that Lauper wants to keep private, but at the end of the day it's a reminder that she remains one of the most likable, honest, and true-to-herself artists of her era.
No matter how many times I've listened to her albums (or better yet, "experienced" her albums) and hummed her many tunes, one question has always lingered in my mind: How could an introverted, guitar playing, singer/songwriter from Alberta, with her long, stringy, blonde locks, and shy but radiant toothy grin make such a tremendous impact upon so many different artists?
Through her song "Chelsea Morning," Bill Clinton came up with the name for his daughter. Her 1974 album Court and Spark served as "a Bible" for a teenage Madonna. For the artist formerly known as Prince, she helped to teach him the "color" of songwriting. (He even dedicated his 1980 "Dirty Mind" album to her.) One of her signature songs, "Big Yellow Taxi" was remixed for the "Friends" soundtrack. She served as a prime influence for Seal, and even recorded two duets with him. Most importantly, she paved the way for an incredibly diverse list of female singer/songwriters such as Tori Amos, Alanis Morrisette, Annie Lennox, The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde, Cyndi Lauper, and Courtney Love.
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