Cyndi Lauper names Taylor Swift album that really won her over: ‘It was wonderful’
Cyndi Lauper is singing Taylor Swift’s praises. “Look, I like her,” the “True Colors” singer told the BBC’s The One Show this month. “I think she’s terrific, and I think that, as an artist, she writes some wonderful songs.”
But there was one album — of Swift’s 11 originals — that really won her over. “I first started listening to her during the pandemic, when she wrote the record, when she went and hibernated and did that record, that wonderful, like, folk record almost,” Lauper said of 2020’s Folklore.
“It was wonderful,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer raved about the woman she’s been photographed with at music events over the years. “I’m proud of her. I think she’s terrific.”
Swift’s Folklore won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and it produced singles like “Cardigan” and “Exile,” a collaboration with Bon Iver. It was a commercial smash, becoming the best-selling album of the year and breaking records.
During her interview, Lauper also made a joke about Swift’s boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce: “Don’t mess with her, ’cause…” and pretended to throw a punch.
In a new interview with The Guardian this week, Lauper revealed that when she was recording her debut album, 1983’s She’s So Unusual, which included hit songs such as “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “She Bop,” and “Time After Time,” her record label tried to pit her against another female music star, Madonna.
“As if you could only have one woman who is successful. What the hell is that about?” Lauper said. “That woman’s been entertaining us for years. She’s made great pop songs. I want to be competitive, but not pitted against another woman. I’m not into that.”
Lauper is the subject of the new documentary, Let the Canary Sing, which is available on Paramount+.
“I think she’s terrific. As an artist, she writes some wonderful songs,” said Lauper of Swift, who’s currently in Europe on her Eras Tour.
Cyndi Lauper knows the moment she became a Swiftie. The 71-year-old “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” icon opened up about her Taylor Swift fandom in a new interview with BBC’s The One Show, revealing which album turned her on to the global pop superstar’s work.
“Look, I like her,” Lauper told the outlet. “I think she’s terrific. As an artist, she writes some wonderful songs.”
The Grammy winner then detailed her introduction to Swift’s music. “I first started listening during the pandemic, when she went and hibernated and did that wonderful folk record,” she said, appearing to reference 2020’s Folklore.
“It was wonderful,” added Lauper. “I’m proud of her.”
The two musicians have crossed paths in the past, as they’ve been photographed together at various awards shows. Swift also performed during Lauper’s virtual Home for the Holidays concert — shortly after the release of Folklore.
Lauper previously praised the chart-topping album, which featured the hits “Cardigan,” “Exile” and “Willow,” in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone. “She’s always been a wonderful writer, but that album was poetry,” she said at the time.
Swift is currently performing shows in Europe on her Eras Tour. During a recent performance at London’s Wembley Stadium, she was joined on stage by her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, during the “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” outfit change.
“I’m still cracking up/swooning over @killatrav’s Eras Tour debut 🥰 Never going to forget these shows,” Swift wrote on Instagram afterwards.
Lauper, on the other hand, recently announced her massive upcoming Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, a 23-date string of arena concerts in celebration of her decades-long career.
The “True Colors” artist’s first major headlining tour since 2013, the run kicks off Friday, Oct. 18 in Montreal and continue its North American leg through Dec. 5 in Chicago.
In an October 2022 interview with PEOPLE, Lauper previously teased the idea of a farewell tour. “I might go out on tour one more time — big time — and maybe be the headliner,” she said at the time.
Taylor Swift told fans at her ‘Eras Tour’ concert at London’s Wembley Stadium that her album ‘Folklore’ transformed her songwriting. The 34-year-old pop superstar took to the stage at the iconic soccer venue on Friday night (21.06.24) and before playing her track ‘Betty’ she spoke about how she reinvented her music on her acclaimed 2020 LP. Taylor told the sell-out crowd that ‘Folklore’ will always be a record that is special to her because it helped her grow as an artist. She said: “‘Folklore’ is an album that I’m always going to be so proud of. When I play favourites with albums it tends to be the ones where I change things up, because that’s always the most exciting thing for me.
“‘Folkore’ was really unlike anything I’d had made before that, not just in the way that it sounded but also in the stories that I was telling. Before ‘Folklore’ a lot of my music was very like dear diary today I felt a feeling for, like, four seconds, here’s an entire song about it. Which is very fun to do, it’s very fun to write like that but it’s also fun to write the way I started to write on ‘Folkore’ which is creating fictional characters, make them go through stuff and feel things and have drama unfold and they have that happen to them and I write as the narrator, that’s a blast it turns out.”
Taylor – who worked on her eighth studio album with The National’s Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff – also told fans that writing the album helped her get through the COVID-19 pandemic and cope during the imposed lockdowns. She added: “I think for me one thing that is very important about this album is that I started writing it two days into the pandemic and I think we were all looking for escapes during lockdown, we were so confused about what was going on in the world. We would just escape into either movies or books, TV or endless bottles of wine, or all of the above. One of the things I did to escape was to write ‘Folklore’ and this wasn’t just an album where I wrote songs, I had a whole aesthetic image of what the album was. It was like an imaginary word where I, like, lived in this cabin and in my imagination I was like a woman wondering through the woods at night holding a candle wearing a Victorian night gown, that was like my whole aesthetic. So I would just pretend that that what was going on instead of what was really going on and I was writing stories about different characters and this is a song I wrote about a girl named Betty.”
During that section of her staggering set, Taylor also performed ‘Cardigan’, ‘August’, ‘Illicit Affairs’ and ‘My Tears Ricochet’ from ‘Folklore’, as well as ‘Champagne Problems’, ‘Marjorie’ and ‘Willow’ from her follow-up album ‘Evermore’. The 90,000-plus crowd at Wembley Stadium contained a host of famous faces, including Taylor’s American football player boyfriend Travis Kelce, her supermodel friend Cara Delevingne, ‘Bridgerton’ actress Nicola Coughlan, Prince William and his three children Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, nine, and six-year-old Prince Louis and fellow royals Zara and Mike Tindall.
“I think she’s terrific. As an artist, she writes some wonderful songs,” said Lauper of Swift, who’s currently in Europe on her Eras Tour.
Source: People, BBC, The Guardian
