Music

“To finally be the headliner and not the maid of honor or the freakin’ bridesmaid?” Cyndi Lauper says with a laugh over Zoom. “It was pretty good.” The Brooklyn-born pop/rock legend is talking about her first-ever headlining show at New York’s Madison Square Garden last fall, part of her Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour. These goodbye shows — an invigorating blast of rock energy, pop balladry pathos and vivid art – have been met with rave reviews from fans and critics alike. After overseas legs in Europe, Australia and Japan, Lauper is bringing her tour back to the States (and Canada) this summer for 24 final North American dates, kicking off July 17 in Mansfield, Mass.

Selling out arenas like MSG was a huge part of the reason Lauper – who will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this fall – wanted to do this farewell tour in the first place. While wrapping up mastering on a soundtrack companion to her 2023 career-retrospective documentary Let the Canary Sing, Lauper says that “everybody turned around and said, ‘Why don’t you do a farewell tour?’” The Grammy, Emmy and Tony winner was into the idea, but with a condition: “If I’m leaving, I would like to headline these places,” she recalls telling her team. “I don’t want to play theaters – I’m in theaters anyway,” she notes, tipping to the fact that she’s spent much of the last 15 years working in musical theater, between Broadway’s Tony-gobbling Kinky Boots and a long-gestating musical adaptation of the 1988 film Working Girl she’s still crafting with Theresa Rebeck.

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Now, for the tour’s North American swan song this summer, Lauper wants the chance to reconnect with fans in places she missed last fall. “I didn’t get to Philadelphia [last year]. I’m going to leave and not go to Philly?” she asks rhetorically ahead of a July 20 date in the City of Brotherly Love. “I wanted to say goodbye to everybody. I really do. That’s the end of this chapter.”

The final North American dates of her Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour will feature some changes – including a setlist swap thanks to a famous fashion designer. Apart from alterations to the staging to accommodate outdoor venues, the Billboard Hot 100-topping singer is adding in some dance music for her fervent LGBTQ fanbase. “I am going to switch one song, because Christian Siriano said, ‘The gays want glamor.’ On Instagram, somebody wrote, ‘The gays love glamor, but they also love to dance. Would you mind just putting in a dance song from [the 2008 album] Bring Ya to the Brink?’ I thought that was really funny,” she admits. “So I said okay, fine.”

While it’s hard to quibble with an injection of upbeat dance music (just imagine if she sang “Sex Is in the Heel” from Kinky Boots? A stan can dream!) to the setlist, the show’s standout moments often come during her peerless ballads. “Time After Time” has found her duetting with guests like Sam Smith and Lucinda Williams, while “True Colors” and “Sally’s Pigeons” are staged in a way that’s as much performance art as pop music (Daniel Wurtzel’s “air fountain” factors heavily into those).

Lauper says it’s impossible for her to pick a standout moment from the shows, though – and she means that literally. “Once I step out there, I’m not there anymore because I’m in it,” she insists. “I used to work at Belmont walking the horses. I feel like one of those racehorses – you’re in it but you can’t think. You have to have one foot in reality and one foot in someplace else, and that place is where things come through you.” She once had a conversation with Prince about this very topic, which he likened to turning off a third eye. “He was like, ‘Part of you, you go out of your mind a little bit [on stage]. You’re not there. You can’t be, because if you are, then you have a third eye. And all of a sudden, whatever magic, otherworldly door it is that you’re knocking on is not going to open.’”

Accidents, however, can test that tenuous connection. Lauper describes one such incident during this tour’s “Sally’s Pigeons,” which features a white sheet undulating through the air thanks to an assortment of crisscrossed fans (not the flesh-and-blood type). “It’s so beautiful, right? Gorgeous. One time I saw that big sheet, it went right up — I had to look away because I was going to start laughing – it fell right on top of somebody. I saw everybody scrambling,” she chuckles. “It’s live, right? You don’t know what the heck (will happen).”

Mostly, however, she’s able to stay in the magic zone – though she admits to fighting some serious nerves prior to that first headlining MSG show. “Before I went on stage at Madison Square Garden, I was thinking, ‘You idiot. You had all your friends come here, and if you fall flat on your face, everybody and all your friends are going to see.’ Then I said to myself, ‘No, be positive. Do not think like that.’ I was like, ‘You know, it’s only rock n’ roll, but I like it. Whatever.’”

Lauper did not, for the record, fall flat on her face, literally or metaphorically – I was there, and it was one of the best concerts I’d seen in years, both performance-wise and conceptually. Much of the tour’s aesthetic traces to Lauper’s love for art, museums and eye-popping fashion; the tour boasts original collaborations with Wurtzel, Siriano, Geoffrey Mac, Brian Burke and Yayoi Kusama. “When you’re moving and you have all that color, it’s like a painting,” Lauper says in her gloriously unrepentant Brooklyn accent – a tone one doesn’t typically associate with a hifalutin arts discourse. “[Kusama] wore her art, and for me in the ‘80s, that’s kind of what I was doing,” she says of the Japanese artist whose distinct polka-dot palette broke through globally around when Lauper catapulted onto MTV and the Billboard charts. “I could kick myself for not knowing in the ‘80s – I had no idea about Kusama. But I was on the hamster wheel and peddling so fast that I did not go to museums (back then), which was sad for me.”

While the 71-year-old icon makes time to experience art in her life these days, it’s hard to escape the sneaking suspicion that, unlike many musicians who can’t keep away from the grind, it’s the hamster wheel that’s following her.

Prior to the tour’s next leg kicking off in July, Lauper is still tinkering with the music for Working Girl. “I am short four songs that I gotta do before the tour, but I think I can do it,” she sighs. “June is pretty full. My God, everything happened at once,” she says, noting that she also needs to start prepping for her induction. “Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is on the eighth (of November), and (Working Girl) opens on the ninth. Wow. So, kill me now, right?”

Schedule overload notwithstanding, Lauper sounds honored to join many of the legends who inspired her in the Rock Hall’s ranks. “It’s a community of people, rockers that have changed the world,” she muses. “Here’s the thing: I still believe that rock n’ roll can save the world. I just want people to remember that we did make a difference. We can make a difference if we band together. We must come together as a community and make light and bring people together to make change, to do the good work.”

For Lauper, sharing her story in her Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour is part of that. “I wanted to have people know who the hell has been singing to them all this time so they would have a connection. And maybe they would be inspired to look at their history, to understand themselves,” she opines. “Everybody has a different perspective. When you tell your story, it makes human beings closer. It makes communities. That’s very important. In the darkest time, remember – you write the chapters, you make light.”