Eric Hanlon sent the article.

 

Music section: Lauper glories in pop 'Cyns'
by Geoffrey Kula

Cyndi Lauper doesn't see her career retrospective-greatest hits package "Twelve Deadly Cyns...And then Some" as a return to the pop-music arena.

 

"I'm not re-entering, because I never went anywhere," said Lauper, who took two years off from touring while "Hat Full of Stars" and "Cyns" were released.

 

The Queens, N.Y., native, who performs Sunday at the Mix 98.5 Fall Fest on Boston Common, became a household name in 1984 when her feminist pop anthem "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" skyrocketed to No.2 on the Billboard singles chart. It was the first single from her debut, "She's So Unusual," which quickly sold more than 4 million copies.

 

But the eccentrically dressed and oddly tressed singer's fortune didn't stop there; her hits literally followed one after the other. "She's So Unusual" spawned four consecutive Top Five singles that year: "Girls," "Time After Time," "She Bop," and "All Through the Night."

 

And they're all on "Cyns," along with other faves such as "Change of Heart" and "True Colors," remixes of "Money Changes Everything" and "She Bop" and three previously unreleased songs: a reworking of her first hit, "Hey Man (Girls Just Want to Have Fun)," "Come on Home" and "I'm Gonna Be Strong," a song Lauper wrote with her first group, Blue Angel.

 

The album's first single, "Hey Man," was the result of Lauper's quest for growth, her recent fascination with techno and the opportunity to work with labelmate Patra. The reggae-tinged dance number shows Lauper eyeing the club circuit.

 

Similarly, reggae influences abound on the new "Come on Home," which echoes Bob Marley's early work and distinctly resembles the Rastafarian's "Simmer Down."

 

Experimenting with musical styles and taking chances is nothing new to the 42-year-old singer.

 

"Being safe in music: Why bother?" she asked. "You do it because you love it, so you might as well do what you want. When you don't know if an idea is going to work or not, and it does work...that's magical. And that's what makes music so fantastic for me."

 

Lauper plans to release an album of dance music after her next album, which she will begin recording in early 1996.

 

"Expressing individualism, for me as an artist, is whenever I feel, I do...whether I paint myself or what's in front of me," she said. "I used to paint myself pretty severely, because I couldn't paint what I wanted in my own music."

 

That explains the hair and jewelry, then?

 

"The hair; yes," she confessed. "The jewelry...well, I've always had a weakness for jewelry."