The Second Hand Unwinds: How Cyndi Lauper Wrote “Time After Time” at the Last Minute

It is one of the most beloved ballads ever recorded — a song about devotion so steady it feels like gravity — and it almost didn’t exist. When Cyndi Lauper walked into the studio in the spring of 1983 to finish her debut album, She’s So Unusual, the record was essentially done. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was in the can. “She Bop” was in the can. “All Through the Night” was in the can. The album that would make her a star was, for all practical purposes, finished — a complete, shimmering, Day-Glo pop record with no room to spare.

Then her producer said they needed one more song. One more. And that one more turned out to be the one that mattered most.

What happened next is a small miracle of pop history: two heartbroken songwriters, a piano, a television listing for a science-fiction movie, and a wristwatch running backward. Out of those unlikely ingredients came “Time After Time” — Lauper’s first number-one single, her most covered song, the ballad that Miles Davis fell in love with, and the record that proved the wild girl with the orange hair had the deepest heart in pop.

This is the story of the last song written for She’s So Unusual, and the first song the world will remember Cyndi Lauper by.

The Girl Who Fought to Write

To understand “Time After Time,” you have to understand where Cyndi Lauper stood in early 1983. She was thirty, a veteran of the New York club scene, fronting a vision — thrift-store punk, Day-Glo hair, a voice that could strip paint — that the industry didn’t quite know what to do with. Her debut solo album was being assembled by producer Rick Chertoff, and much of it was built from outside songs: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” had been written by Robert Hazard; “All Through the Night” by Jules Shear. Lauper was the personality, the voice, the image — but she was fighting, song by song, to be the writer too.

“I kept fighting to write a song for this record with one of these guys,” Lauper later said. “What I thought was great is that we were able to take real-life things, real things that were really happening — things that people said, things that people did — and put them right in the song.”

That fight is the hidden engine of “Time After Time.” It isn’t a song that was handed to a singer; it’s a song a singer demanded the right to write, in the final days of an album that was already finished without it. Everything about the record — its intimacy, its plainspoken ache, its feeling of something true being said quietly — comes from that insistence. Lauper wasn’t performing someone else’s heartbreak. She was writing her own.

“One More Song”

The man who made it happen was Rick Chertoff. The producer had been steering the She’s So Unusual sessions, and he had an instinct about what the album still lacked: a ballad, a moment of stillness, something to balance the Day-Glo exuberance. A debut album that was all fun and no heart would be a novelty record; Chertoff wanted a career record. He also knew just the collaborator. In the spring of 1983, he introduced Lauper to Rob Hyman — a Philadelphia musician, a founding member of the band the Hooters, a songwriter with a craftsman’s patience and a piano player’s heart.

“It was the first time we met her,” Hyman recalled. “We talked and right from the jump she was so unusual. She was definitely different and striking and creative. One thing led to another — she saw our band, we got a chance to hear one of her demos.”

By then, Lauper had already recorded the majority of the album. But Chertoff insisted: she and Hyman needed to record just “one more song.” So they sat at a piano together and started working. It was a tryout in every sense — Lauper even decamped to Philadelphia for a stretch, staying with a friend, working in the Hooters’ rehearsal studio, testing drummers and bass players. In the end, Hyman and his bandmate Eric Bazilian played most of the guitars and keyboards on the album sessions themselves, with Chertoff producing. They became her band for the record. And at the piano, in those first writing sessions, something clicked that nobody — not Chertoff, not Hyman, certainly not Lauper — could have predicted.

Philadelphia

The Philadelphia chapter of the story deserves its own telling, because it’s where the song stopped being an assignment and started being a collaboration. Lauper came down from New York and moved into the Hooters’ world — rehearsing in their studio, running through demos, trying out rhythm sections. “She came down to Philadelphia and was staying with a friend,” Hyman recalled. “She worked with us in our rehearsal studio and did a bunch of demos, so it was really a tryout period — we also tried out some drummers and bass players, but it ended up being Eric and myself doing most of the guitars and keyboards, and Rick producing. We became her band for that album.”

Picture it: the most flamboyant new star in New York pop, holed up in a Philadelphia rehearsal room with a bar band, working out songs the unglamorous way — playing them until they felt right. No image consultants, no stylists, just musicians in a room. It was in that room, at that piano, that “Time After Time” was truly born — not in the New York studio where it was recorded, but in the Philly rehearsal space where two songwriters figured out what they wanted to say. The song’s intimacy isn’t a production trick. It’s a documentary recording of how it was made: two people, one piano, no audience yet.

A Title from the TV Guide

Every great song needs a title, and “Time After Time” got its title from the unlikeliest of muses: the television listings. Lauper had seen the 1979 science-fiction film Time After Time — the Malcolm McDowell, Mary Steenburgen time-travel romance — listed in TV Guide magazine, and the phrase lodged in her brain. She brought it to the piano as a placeholder, a temporary flag to write around. “I think I have a title,” she said.

Hyman remembered the moment the music found the words: “Cyndi came up with the title when she saw it in the magazine TV Guide. When she saw ‘Time After Time,’ something clicked — she said ‘I think I have a title.’ I was sitting at the piano and just started banging out what would eventually be the chorus, hook, and the way we sing it.”

The placeholder never got replaced, because it turned out to be perfect. “Time after time” — the phrase is a promise and a rhythm at once, the sound of devotion as a repeating pattern, the verbal equivalent of the ticking clock that would end up in the arrangement. It gave the song its cyclical, almost hypnotic quality: the title is the thesis, and everything else is the proof. Lauper had intended it as scaffolding. It became the architecture — and then the address, the thing the whole world would call the song.

Two Broken Hearts

What the two writers brought to that piano, besides talent, was heartbreak — fresh, specific, and simultaneous. Hyman was coming out of a long, hard relationship, the kind that leaves you questioning your judgment about everything. Lauper was having difficulties with her boyfriend and manager, David Wolff — the man steering her career while their personal life frayed at the edges, a entanglement of love and business that made every disagreement twice as heavy. Neither of them was writing in the abstract. They were writing about what it feels like to love someone when love is difficult — to stay, to wait, to keep showing up, even when showing up is the hardest thing.

One of the first lines Hyman wrote was “suitcase of memories” — an image of a relationship as luggage, packed and carried, heavy with everything two people have been through. From there, the lyrics came pouring out of Lauper’s own experience: the late-night phone calls, the second chances, the quiet heroism of simply not leaving. “What I thought was great,” she said, “is that we were able to take real-life things, real things that were really happening — things that people said, things that people did — and put them right in the song.”

Listen to the lyric now and you can hear the documentary quality: “Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you.” That’s not poetry-school imagery. That’s 3 a.m. That’s a real bed, a real clock, a real person not sleeping. The song’s genius is that it never reaches for grandeur — it reaches for the nightstand, the telephone, the suitcase — and finds grandeur there anyway. Two writers, each nursing a wounded heart, comparing notes at a piano: the verses are Lauper’s restlessness, the chorus is their shared resolve. “If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me, time after time.” It’s not a promise made from strength. It’s a promise made from the knowledge of how easily people get lost — because both of them, that spring, were a little lost themselves.

The Watch That Ran Backward

The most famous line in the song — “the second hand unwinds” — came from a moment so strange it sounds invented, except that Lauper herself has told the story, more than once, including in a 2006 interview on Sound Off with Matt Pinfield. During the studio sessions, producer Rick Chertoff glanced at his wristwatch and noticed something impossible: the hands were going in reverse.

“He said, ‘Look at this thing, the second hand is unwinding,’” Lauper recalled. “My watch is going backward. The second hand is unwinding.” In the studio, the impossible felt briefly possible — and for a song about second chances, about time giving lovers another go, it was the perfect omen.

Lauper did what songwriters do: she stole it. “Because I think you have to take bits of everything that is happening and put it in the song,” she said, “I put that in the song.” And so a malfunctioning watch became one of the great images in pop — time itself running backward, unwinding, giving the lovers a second chance at the moments they’d already lived. It’s the Time After Time movie’s time-travel premise smuggled into a love song: what if we could go back? What if the clock ran the other way?

The line also gave the arrangement its signature: the ticking-clock percussion that runs through the track like a pulse. Time, in “Time After Time,” isn’t just the subject. It’s the instrumentation.

June 1983: The Record Plant

The song was recorded in June 1983 at the Record Plant in New York City, in the final stages of the album sessions — one of the last songs cut for She’s So Unusual. Chertoff produced, and the track he built is a marvel of restraint: simple keyboard-synth chords, bright jangly guitars, that ticking-clock percussion, and an elastic bassline that seems to breathe. Every element serves the vocal. The synths don’t show off; they cushion. The guitars don’t riff; they chime, like light through a window. And underneath it all, the clock keeps ticking — the song’s heartbeat, the sound of time passing while the singer promises to outlast it.

After the maximalist pop of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” it sounded like a different artist entirely — quieter, older, wiser. That was the point, and it was a gamble. In 1983, the industry wanted Lauper to be the fun girl forever; a tender ballad risked breaking the spell. Instead, it deepened it. It was Lauper proving, in a single track, that the wild girl could break your heart without raising her voice — and that the persona had always been only half the story.

Hyman didn’t just co-write the song; he sang on it, taking the second voice in the chorus, his warm tenor doubling Lauper’s unmistakable soprano. It’s one of the record’s loveliest details: the co-writer, the fellow broken heart, literally harmonizing with her on the promise — “time after time,” two voices, one vow. In the studio, after the long writing sessions, they stayed late to compose and cut it — two people who’d started as strangers, brought together by a producer’s hunch, finishing each other’s musical sentences. The Hooters’ Eric Bazilian contributed guitars and keyboards alongside Hyman, and the whole thing was cut with the intimacy of a demo and the polish of a single. It sounds like two people at a piano at 3 a.m., because that’s essentially what it was.

Here’s the twist nobody saw coming: Epic Records initially wanted “Time After Time” to be the album’s lead single — Lauper’s debut single, the world’s first impression. Cooler heads prevailed, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” went first and peaked at number 2, and “Time After Time” was held back as the follow-up. It was the right call, and it set up one of the great one-two punches in pop history: the party, then the morning after; the fun, then the devotion. The label had wanted to lead with the heart; instead, they led with the grin, and let the heart arrive as a revelation.

Anatomy of the Record

Strip “Time After Time” to its bones and it’s almost shockingly simple: a handful of chords, cycling, never showing off. The verses sit low and conversational — Lauper practically talking, the clock ticking behind her — and then the chorus lifts, just enough, into the promise. There’s no big key change, no vocal acrobatics, no gospel choir. The drama is all in the restraint: the feeling that the singer is holding something back, and that the holding-back is the point.

That’s what separates it from every other power ballad of the era. While her contemporaries were building songs like skyscrapers — bigger choruses, higher notes, more everything — Lauper and Chertoff built a room. The jangly guitars ring like a memory. The bassline breathes. Hyman’s harmony vocal in the chorus is the masterstroke: suddenly it’s not one person promising, it’s two, and the song becomes a duet about mutual rescue. The arrangement understands something profound about devotion: it’s quiet. It’s repetitive. It ticks like a clock, and it doesn’t stop.

Number One

“Time After Time” was released as the album’s second single in early 1984, and radio knew immediately what it had. The ballad that had been an afterthought — the “one more song” — became Lauper’s first number-one single in the United States, topping the Billboard Hot 100 on June 9, 1984, and holding the top spot for two weeks. It was a slow, steady climb, the chart trajectory of a record winning on word of mouth rather than hype: listeners heard it once, and they needed to hear it again. It also hit number one on the Adult Contemporary chart — the song’s natural home, the format built for records that soothe — reached number 3 in the UK, and peaked at number 6 in Australia. The girl who’d had to fight to get her own song on her own album had written herself to the top of the world, on three continents at once.

The industry noticed. “Time After Time” was nominated for Song of the Year at the 1985 Grammy Awards — the songwriter’s Grammy, the one that honors the writing itself. (It lost to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” no shame in that.) And the song kept working long after the chart run ended, becoming the emotional centerpiece of Lauper’s live shows and the record her fans hold closest. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” made her famous. “Time After Time” made her beloved.

It also helped make She’s So Unusual historic. The album spun off four top-five singles on the Billboard Hot 100 — “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Time After Time,” “She Bop,” and “All Through the Night” — making Lauper the first woman in history to achieve that feat with a debut album. And in 1985, she won her first Grammy for the record. The girl who’d had to fight to get a single original song onto her debut had made one of the defining albums of the decade — and the song she’d fought for was its beating heart.

The Song Everybody Sings

If chart positions measure a song’s success, covers measure its soul — and by that standard, “Time After Time” is one of the most successful songs ever written. According to SecondHandSongs’ database, the ballad has been covered more than 400 times, making it one of the most covered songs of the rock era. Stacker’s ranking of the most covered rock songs of all time places it at number 18, with 317 documented covers and counting. Pop stars, jazz legends, country singers, punk bands, reality-show contestants: everybody, it seems, has needed to sing “Time After Time” at some point, the way everybody at some point needs to say “I’ll be waiting.”

The covers tell the story of the song’s strange universality. INOJ’s 1998 R&B version reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a top-ten hit fourteen years after the original, proof that the song’s bones were strong enough for a completely different body. Sarah McLachlan, Willie Nelson, Pink, Leona Lewis, Eva Cassidy: the list reads like a cross-section of popular music itself, artists from every genre finding their own heartbreak in Lauper and Hyman’s three a.m. meditation. A jazz trumpeter, a country legend, a Lilith Fair angel, a dance-pop diva — what do they have in common? Only this: at some point, each of them needed to say “time after time,” and Lauper had already found the perfect way to say it. The song has appeared in films — it plays a pivotal role in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, where it underscores the movie’s themes of friendship and second chances — and on television, in commercials, in wedding first dances beyond counting. There is a whole generation for whom “Time After Time” isn’t a radio memory but a life memory: the song that played when they walked down the aisle, or slow-danced at prom, or drove home at midnight with someone they loved. It has become what “Yesterday” was to an earlier generation: the ballad everyone knows, the standard everyone tries.

But one cover towers over the rest — and it’s the one Lauper herself loves best.

Miles

Miles Davis — the most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century, the man who recorded Kind of Blue — fell in love with “Time After Time.” He heard something in Lauper’s ballad that spoke to him, and he did what Miles did with songs he loved: he made it his own. His version, an instrumental, appeared on his 1985 album You’re Under Arrest, and he played it regularly in his concerts for the rest of his life — setlist data shows it was his most performed cover song in 1984 and 1985, played dozens of times.

Think about that for a moment. Miles Davis, who could play anything, chose to spend his final years playing a song written in a last-minute session by a thirty-year-old pop singer and a Philadelphia bar-band pianist. He stripped the lyric away and found that the melody didn’t need it — the devotion was in the notes themselves. Setlist records show “Time After Time” was the song Davis covered more than any other in 1984 and 1985, his most-played cover across dozens of concerts. For a man whose career was defined by ruthless forward motion — who never looked back, never repeated himself — to keep returning to one pop ballad, night after night, is the most eloquent review the song ever received.

Lauper has said the Davis cover is her favorite, and it’s easy to hear why: it’s the ultimate validation of the song she fought to write. The girl who had to battle to get one original on her debut album wrote something Miles Davis couldn’t put down.

The Davis connection also reveals what “Time After Time” really is: not a pop song that jazz musicians condescend to, but a standard — a composition sturdy enough to survive being taken apart and rebuilt in any idiom, in any decade, by any hands. The chord changes hold. The melody sings without words. The ticking clock ticks in any tempo. Lauper and Hyman didn’t just write a hit; they wrote a song that behaves like it’s always existed.

The Ballad That Became the Signature

Here is the paradox at the heart of Cyndi Lauper’s career: she arrived as a cartoon — the orange hair, the thrift-store bustiers, the “girls just wanna” grin — and she endured as a balladeer. “Time After Time” is the record that made that possible. It told the world that the wildness was a choice, not a limitation; that underneath the persona was a songwriter of plainspoken, devastating precision. The fun girl could do fun better than anyone. But the ballad proved she could do the other thing — the thing that lasts.

The song also rewrote Lauper’s own story. Before “Time After Time,” she was the fun girl, the novelty, the voice. After it, she was an artist — a writer, a Grammy-nominated composer, the woman Miles Davis covered. It gave her the credibility to have the long career she’s had: the Broadway triumph of Kinky Boots (for which, in 2013, she became the first solo woman ever to win the Tony for Best Original Score), the blues albums, the activism, the decades of touring. Every chapter since has rested, quietly, on the foundation poured in those last-minute sessions in the spring of 1983 — on the proof that Cyndi Lauper, given a piano and a broken heart, could write a standard.

And the song itself has never aged. That’s the strangest thing about it. Play “Time After Time” today — the ticking clock, the jangly guitars, Lauper’s voice catching on “the second hand unwinds” — and it doesn’t sound like 1984. It sounds like 3 a.m., which is the same in every year, in every town, for every heart that’s ever waited up. The production is of its time, but the feeling is outside of time. Which is, of course, exactly what the title promised.

Time After Time, After Time

Cyndi Lauper fought to write one song for her debut album. She got her “one more song” — written at a piano with a stranger who became a collaborator, titled after a TV listing, built from a broken heart and a backward watch — and it became the most enduring ballad of the 1980s. It gave her her first number one. It gave Miles Davis his favorite cover. It gave four hundred other artists something to sing when words failed them. It gave a generation of listeners a promise to hold onto: if you’re lost, you can look, and you will find me.

That’s the thing about the songs that last. They don’t last because they’re perfect; they last because they’re true. “Time After Time” is true in the way a late-night phone call is true — unpolished, unguarded, unwilling to let go. Lauper and Hyman wrote it from the middle of their own heartbreaks, and every heartbreak since has recognized itself in it.

The next time you hear it — in a grocery store, at a wedding, in the quiet of your car at night — listen for the clock. It’s still ticking, all these years later, keeping perfect time. The second hand unwinds. The lovers stay. And the girl who kept fighting to write her own song turned out to be right about the only thing that ever mattered: the real things, the things that were really happening, were the only things worth putting in. Time after time, after time, after time.