Cindi Lauper: Country Star

Cyndi Lauper's country music album
"Detour" is to be released May 6.  

Cyndi Lauper is now a country singer, I kid you not.

Lauper is known for her long musical career, highlighted by the 1980s classic "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and for writing the songs for the Broadway smash "Kinky Boots."

She's got a long list of hits under her belt. She's smart, funny, a great writer. You can't deny that.

But Lauper, also known for her thick Queens accent, doesn't come off as a country singer. Early indications from her new country album "Detour"  

The album is all country classics that we've all heard and loved before; Most notably, she does covers of two Patsy Cline songs, "Walkin' After Midnight" and "I Fall To Pieces."

In the press release announcing that the country album will drop in May, Lauper said, "I spent a lot of time in my room singing with Patsy. I had to sing a Patsy Cline song - or two - because her voice was like one of my girlfriends. That's how close I felt to her."

Lauper gets some help in "Detour" from some big country music stars, singing duets with the likes of   Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill and Alison Krauss. That's the track I most want to hear: Lauper and Krauss singing Dolly Parton's "Hard Candy Christmas."

Judging from the following YouTube video, in which Lauper sings the country classic "Heartache By the Numbers," she really does work as a country singer. It's not the best version I've ever heard of the song, but I definitely like it.

You go Cyndi!

Here's "Heartache By The Numbers" by Cindi Lauper:

Video Proves 2013 Country Music Was Mostly Just Cliches

Believe me, there is such a thing as an incredibly well crafted, well written, catchy, wonderful country song.

Unfortunately, like a lot of genres that are pretty mass market, most country music recently has consisted of tired old cliches. Which is why I generally don't listen to Top 40 country radio stations.

Want the proof? Watch this video that shows that in 2013, country music was only about trucks, dirt roads, riverbanks and hot girls in tight jeans.

Yawn:

Musgraves' "Merry Go-Round" the Ultimate Country Music Gem

I can't get enough of a tune I've been hearing on country radio stations this fall called "Merry Go Round," by Kacey Musgraves.

Many people don't realize it, but some of the best, most literate, honest and wise songwriting is in country music. You just have to wade through a sea of rural American cliches to get to the good stuff.

Kasey Musgraves

And this might turn into my favorite country song ever. Pay attention, people who say they don't like country music. You'll love this one.

The song is disarming. Musgraves delivers "Merry Go Round" witha straight forward, calm, sweet but not saccharine voice. Further setting you up for the kill, the song plays on the variety of homonyms and themes associated with the word "Mary," And there's references to childrens' fables.

Then you pay attention to the lyrics and get this:

"Mama's hooked on Mary Kay
Brother's hooked on Mary Jane
And daddy's hooked on Mary two doors down.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
We get bored so we get married
And just like dust we settle in this town

On this broken merry-go-round and round and round we go
Where it stops, nobody knows
And it ain't slowing down, this merry go round."

FWIW, here's the music video for the song. Love the old footage of suburbia. More thoughts below that:

 

It's brilliant how the lyrics describe the generations of ennui in small rural towns. Boy, have I seen it here in Vermont. People thing we're all a bunch of merry (that play on words again) hippies, eating our organic vegetables while grooving to Phish and being so loving and liberal and so damned sustainable.

But like probably other rural small town in the nation, we have our sad little towns, sad little neighborhoods of broken mobile homes, where people live their lives by rote, by habit, because some of them don't know any other way.

Many, maybe most of the people who live in these small towns without much money are genuinely happy, fulfilled and active. But certainly not everybody.

And Musgraves bluntly calls attention to that slice of life. Or existence. It's sad, of course, but it's also refreshing to hear a country song that diverges from the usual theme of how honest, faithful, perfect and wonderful everyone in rural America supposedly is.

A lot of people are comparing Musgraves to the awesome Miranda Lambert, who's probably country music's most accurate and creative chronicler of American life.

Sometimes this works out OK, and sometimes, as Musgraves knows, it does not. She ends the song with this killer lyric: 

Jack and Jill went up the hill
Jack burned out on booze and pills
And Mary had a little lamb
Mary just don't give a damn no more.