Cyndi Lauper - The Body Acoustic

Cyndi Lauper
The Body Acoustic

To her credit, Ms. Lauper has been one of the few remnants of the 1980s who have been able to maintain a scaled down, but legitimately musical career since her initial big success in the first half of that much maligned decade. Her voice had to outlive her haircut.

She always had a distinct voice, and on this release, she puts it in some interesting contexts; largely acoustic, but the purpose here is reworks of her older material with collaborations that take the music quite often far afield of its original recordings. Money Changes Everything is a backwoods alt-country track with Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday, and the folky pop of All Through the Night features...Shaggy? While it isn't the best cut, for whatever reason, it does not totally fall on its face either.

While it will most likely appeal to the Santa Cruz coffeehouse set, her remake of Time After Time (one of two songs here with Sarah MacLachlan) is almost too conventional. It doesn't improve or really detract from the original; it just wasn't necessary. The same could be said of True Colours (although the use of real strings is a nice touch). Conversely, one of the few tunes that is all Cyndi is She Bop, which in its new arrangement goes from high speed anthemic pop-rock to a dark, almost Warren Zevon-esque elegy (although its closing ends kind of flat). Sisters of Avalon was a very solid improvemnet from its original, with layers of acoustic guitars and full harmonies between Lauper, Ani DiFranco and Vivian Green.

The real gems of this album is Above The Clouds, which has a repeating piano vamp and the flourishes courtesy of Jeff Beck, of which it is well established as impossible for him to not play tastefully and which Cyndi sings with grace. The other is the ska meets j-pop weirdness of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, a meeting of Ms. Lauper and the Japanese duo Puffy Ami Yumi. Yes, you heard that right.

Part of the reason I think this all works is that Lauper has always been actually mindful of how to sing a tune, and that she likes working with competant people. In this case she had the production services of William Whitman (whose credits include Cyndi's debut as well as the Fixx, Dexter Gordon, and Dar Williams), and session players like Mark Egan, Rob Hyman and Jamie West-Oram. The result is something quite coherent, given the span of guest spots and remaking of arrangements.

Good job, yo.