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Plenty of people get the blues on their birthdays. Cyndi Lauper is sharing hers with the world.
The eccentric singer turns 57 on Tuesday -- and marks the occasion by releasing her 11th album Memphis Blues.
"I didn't plan it that way," Lauper admits in her first Canadian interview to promote the album. "But my friends who are into astrology said, 'That's fantastic!' I have no idea why it's good -- it has something to do with it being in my sun. So I figured, what could be bad about that?
"But I don't believe in astrology. You can use a lot of tools to find out where you stand, but I think you know where you really stand in your heart. You can be the master of your own destiny."
She certainly has. Ever since the quirky firecracker with the turbocharged pipes exploded into the public eye with early '80s hits like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Time After Time, True Colors and She Bop, Lauper has continued to live up the title of her first solo album -- She's So Unusual -- by boldly charting her own course through the unforgiving waters of pop music.
"I don't like to follow along with the crowd," Lauper agrees from her Manhattan home. "And I don't do well at that, anyway. It's not really my thing."
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Her thing has taken her everywhere from classic American standards to cutting-edge dance and electronica, not to mention the world of acting and reality TV. But with Memphis Blues -- a joyous collection of blues oldies cut live in a Tennessee studio with a long list of legends and VIPs -- she journeys to a place that is both timeless yet contemporary, she says.
"Blues is the key to everything we hear today -- jazz, rap, hip-hop, rock 'n' roll," the chatty vocalist explains. "The blues is the birth of it. It's what everything I sing is based on. And right now, my country is singing the blues, what with the oil spilling in the Gulf and people losing their jobs and having their houses foreclosed. So I wanted to do something that spoke to people and told human stories.
"But I didn't want to just make any blues album. I wanted something bigger. That's why I went to Memphis. Because Memphis was where the blues journeyed from Mississippi. Musicians went to get a job, a gig, a record deal. So I thought staying there and recording there and being in the middle of it -- eating and breathing and living it -- was the only way to understand the experience."
Lauper was in good company. Memphis Blues finds her welcoming a who's who roster of greats. Some -- guitarist B.B. King, pianist Allen Toussaint, harmonica master Charles Musselwhite, vocalist Ann Peebles, and young buck Jonny Lang -- you've likely heard of. Others -- like the Hi Records rhythm section and guitarist Charles (Skip) Pitts, who played the chicken-scratch wah-wah guitar on The Theme From Shaft ("How cool is that?" Lauper enthuses) -- you may not know.
Either way, they bring a down-home authenticity to Lauper's loving, playful recreations of Muddy Waters' Rollin' and Tumblin', Louis Jordan's Early in the Mornin' and Albert King's Down Don't Bother Me.
Lauper went up against The Donald during her recent stint on Celebrity Apprentice. But she admits being intimidated by her company in the studio.
"First of all, they were older than me," she says. "Plus I felt bad for them because as musicians, a lot of them never really got their due. Also, I had been to the Civil Rights Museum, and I knew that back when I was growing up listening to their work, they had to go in the back door to perform and were treated really badly. Given all that, I didn't want to say anything at first, you know. As I went along, I did start to arrange stuff the way I do.
"But was it daunting to stand next to Ann Peebles? Oh my God! I had to keep pulling myself together and telling myself to focus. If I tried to tell her what her voice meant to me or how many times I sang along with her music, I would start crying."
Ultimately, of course, the experience was a celebration -- a party Lauper hopes to continue by taking some of the performers on a tour that has her revamping her own hits for the juke joint.
"Girls Just Wanna Have Fun as a blues song is just so much fun. It tears my throat, but boy is it funny. It's not pure blues, but as long as you keep the integrity of the song and the story, it works."
Maintaining that integrity in everything -- from her charitable work for LGBT rights to a Broadway play for which she's writing songs -- is crucial to her. And while she doesn't know where the journey will lead next, she knows it will be somewhere new.
"It would take a lot of medication for me to stay still for long," she laughs. "But right now I just want to stand here in this moment and enjoy it and live it."
As birthday wishes go, not bad.
darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca