Cyndi Lauper: two decades after blazing the way for a generation of female pop singers, the original day-glo diva is reigniting her career with a collection of songs as colorful as she is

EVELYN McDONNELL: Your new album, At Last [Epic/Daylight], is a covers record on which you tackle some very famous songs, but you do so in a really inventive way. For example, you transform the Four Seasons" "Stay" into a mambo jam, and Etta James's "At Last" into a haunting statement of purpose. How did the album develop?

CYNDI LAUPER: Well, I took old pop songs and sung them like standards, then took standards and made them into pop songs. As I started working on all these love songs, I began to realize who all the characters were--they really resonated with me. I thought, My God, these are my stories, and these songs enable me to tell them. That process actually began when I was performing a lot of the songs we recorded for the album live; I would describe the stories and then I would sing the song itself. Then the album really started to take shape: It's like, at last I'm putting on the black dress and black gloves and really using my voice! That's what I do anyway: I'm a storyteller, a singer, and a writer, so this album is a really natural way to be all these things at once. [laughs]

EM: You do some standards like "Unchained Melody" and "Makin' Whoopee." Was that the kind of music you listened to before rock 'n' roll?

CL: All the songs on At Last were popular around the time I was growing up. That kind of music was what was happening culturally before the Beatles came and my sister got her electric guitar and I inherited her acoustic--of course, everything changed once I started playing! But when I was a kid, in my neighborhood in Queens, you always heard music spilling out of the houses. I'd run outside and this lady across the yard with large, drippy arms would play "My Heart Has Wings" on her accordion while she was waiting for her sauce to cook. We were a very colorful bunch, with very different musical tastes. I ran away from a lot of it; you know, if I heard Jimmy Roselli, Jerry Vale, or "Volare" again, I would kill myself. But with these songs, you can really step back in time and remember this and remember that. Music affords you the opportunity to experience that magic.

EM: Tell me about your version of "On the Sunny Side of the Street," a song Louis Armstrong made famous.

CL: Us kids in Queens always looked at Manhattan as the mecca. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere--that's what Frank Sinatra kept saying. I did "On the Sunny Side of the Street" because at one point in my life, I realized there was a lot of power in having absolutely nothing. Freedom is either that you have absolutely everything or you have absolutely nothing--anywhere in between, you struggle. So I just decided that I would find that sunny side of the street and be as rich as Rockefeller--or "Gatesefeller" now. To get beyond everything, that's the side of the street I had to choose to walk on.

EM: Both Stevie Wonder and Tony Bennett appear on At Last, and the album was produced by Russ Titelman, who has worked with Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees.

CL: This album has been an interesting journey for me because I got to work with so many amazing people! Russ, especially, I've wanted to work with for a while. I met him in the early 1990s, and he started sending me tapes of Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson--he used to send me music all the time, and it was never the same kind. So, when I started to conceive of this album, I said, "Gosh, I would love to work with a producer like Russ because he's got a great ear." Some of what he likes, I don't like, and some of the stuff I like, he doesn't--I like those screaming bands that you hear on the radio, some hip-hop like the Neptunes, the Black Eyed Peas, Mary J. Biige, Lil' Kim, and people like Marianne Faithful and Patti Smith. But Russ is really open--he can go from working on softer-sounding stuff to harder stuff, no problem.

EM: Even though you're singing other people's songs, At Last is, in a lot of ways, one of your most personal records.

CL: All you can hope for when you do music is to be able to find the magic in it and fly. Music's always been a great refuge for me, and if you can find that one thing that the other musicians do that's so wonderful, and incorporate it into what you do, then it enriches you.

This album is dedicated to the people on my block and in my neighborhood, their incredible sense of fashion and color and design, wild and tacky as I may have thought it was--and it was--but it was colorful and it had a life.

Evelyn McDonnell is the pop-music critic for The Miami Herald.

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