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Cyndi Lauper: 20 years of marching to own beat

The subject of celebrity red carpet fashion gets Cyndi Lauper hot under the collar.

“I say we need another revolution with the clothes,” the former New Wave diva fumes over the phone. “The designers got in there and the models got in there and they want everybody to look like a model. What about the women who don’t look like models? Why do we have to [expletive] stand behind and dress like we’re told? God forbid we pop out from the crowd.”

Gwen Stefani, give props to one of your fore-sisters. It has been 20 years since Lauper first popped out of the crowd and onto the early MTV airwaves, a punky spitfire done up in thrift store duds and a multicolored mop of hair.

A huggable alternative to Madonna, Lauper exploded onto the pop radar in 1984 with her debut album “She’s So Unusual,” a record that yielded the singles “Time After Time” and the dance floor anthem “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Today, Lauper is touring behind her latest release, “At Last,” a record of pop standards culled mostly from the ’50s and ’60s. She appears at the Cadillac Palace on Friday.

More than image

The cover of her current CD features a serious, blond Lauper emerging from a manhole, dressed in a classy black evening dress and gloves.

It’s not just her image that’s turning heads. Lauper has garnered some well-deserved rave reviews for “At Last.” Although the release features some upbeat numbers — a salsa take on “Stay,” a reggae version of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” — the most effecting numbers are haunting interpretations of familiar tunes that are as sorrowful as they are spare.

She turns well-known hits — from the Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” to Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me” — into powerful, modern torch ballads. Lauper’s voice aches with a grainy, wounded authority.

One of the most powerful interpretations is of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By,” a major hit for Dionne Warwick. Lauper’s production strips away the original’s period pop accents and whittles the song down to its hushed, heartbreaking core.

“The key in this album was to keep the intimacy, but to modernize it,” Lauper explains. “And I chose songs with lyrics that would pertain to now. A song like `Walk on By’ was a song that wasn’t naive, that was of that time, but could be of any time. So when we did that song, I tried to do it in a way that would capture a moment, be expressive of another time but of this time, too, and keep an intimacy.”

Lauper says she has always come from a storytelling place. She grew up in Queens, and her old neighborhood — the people, the street life, the music of the era — played an enormous part in the making of her latest record.

“`Walk on By’ was always a desolate street corner,” she says. “Maybe because that song was spilling out of car radios at the time. I spent a lot of time walking, and I remember 95th Avenue, and what it felt like on a cold fall day, with the leaves brushing the street. And so that’s why that sound found its way into the song. It was part of the emotion of that song.”

Similar to `Colors’

Lauper likens many of her production choices on “At Last” to the same instincts that guided her early hit “True Colors.” She was striving for intimacy, and the primacy of interpretation and mood over big production.

“`True Colors’ was able to grab people by their hearts,” she says. “It was an extraordinary message. And if you put a lot of music on top of an extraordinary message, it gets schmaltzy, and it also takes the power away from the words. It’s just like `Walk on By.’ It’s very powerful, what it’s saying. But the more music you put on, it changes the thought. And that’s what I wanted to go back down to — the empowering thought of the songs.”

Lauper, 50, is just as outspoken about age as she is about models traipsing down red carpets.

“When I was 30, that’s when I came out with `Girls Just Want to Have Fun,'” she says. “And I said the same thing [then that] I say now when people start with the age. I said, `What do you think, I’m some kind of car? You wanna kick the tires and check under the hood and see how the chassis’ doing?’

“It’s kind of insulting. But I don’t really subscribe to the whole ageist thing, because it doesn’t matter to me as long as I’m healthy.”

And still so unusual.