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Cyndi Lauper: The Rebel With a Cause — Love, Motherhood, and the Fight for Every Outsider
The world met Cyndi Lauper as a burst of neon — orange hair, thrift-store layers, a voice that could shatter glass and mend hearts in the same song. But the neon was never the point. It was armor, and underneath it was a girl from Queens who had learned early that the world is hard…
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How Cyndi Lauper Created “She’s So Unusual”: The Story Behind Pop’s Most Daring Debut
In the winter of 1982, a 29-year-old singer walked into New York’s Record Plant with a voice that had twice been declared dead, a bankruptcy still fresh on her record, and a head full of thrift-store fashion. She was, by every industry metric, a terrible bet: too old at twenty-nine, too weird, too broke, too…
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Bruce Springsteen: The Man Who Showed Up
Bruce Springsteen has spent fifty years singing about ordinary people — factory workers, firefighters, kids with nowhere to go. What makes the songs ring true is that he never stopped being one of them, and he never stopped showing up for them. Behind the Boss mythology is a man who battled depression in secret for…
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Bonnie Tyler: A Love Story 53 Years in the Making
Bonnie Tyler sang about total eclipses of the heart, but the real love story of her life needed no drama at all. While the music business spun through its usual cycles of broken marriages and burned bridges — while her own songs chronicled heartbreak in six-minute Wagnerian epics — the girl from Skewen, Wales, stayed…
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How Bonnie Tyler Made “Faster Than the Speed of Night”: The Steinman Thunderbolt
In 1982, Bonnie Tyler was a singer with one of the most extraordinary voices in pop and no idea what to do with it. Her 1978 hit “It’s a Heartache” had made her famous, but the years since had been a drift through forgettable albums and fading chart positions. Then she did something nobody expected:…
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Billy Ocean: The Heart Behind the Hits
Billy Ocean has sold more than thirty million records, topped charts on three continents, and collected a Grammy. But ask him what he’s proudest of, and he won’t point to the platinum discs. He’ll point to the house in Sunningdale he bought with his first real money and never left, the school sweetheart he married…
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How Billy Ocean Created “Suddenly”: The Album That Made Him a Star
By 1983, Billy Ocean was 33 years old, a decade into a recording career, and just about finished. He had tasted success once — a number two hit in Britain with “Love Really Hurts Without You” in 1976 — and then watched it all slip away through seven years of flop albums and fading momentum.…
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Billy Joel: The Heart Behind the Hits
Billy Joel has spent fifty years singing about other people’s lives — the waitress practicing politics, the real estate novelist, Brenda and Eddie. But the most moving songs in his catalog are the ones about his own heart: a father who walked away, a little girl asking what happens when you die, and the late-in-life…
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How Billy Joel Made “The Stranger”: The Three Weeks That Saved His Career
In the summer of 1977, Billy Joel was running out of road. Four albums into his Columbia Records career, he had a beloved cult following, a signature song in “Piano Man,” and almost nothing to show for it commercially. His label was losing patience. Another flop, and the Piano Man might have been shown the…
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Aretha Franklin: The Heart Behind the Hits
The world knew Aretha Franklin’s voice — that titanic, church-shaking instrument that could turn three letters into a revolution. What the world didn’t always see was the heart that powered it: a woman who put her money, her safety, and her reputation on the line for the freedom struggle, who raised four sons away from…