1986 · Behind the Songs
The quietest corner of a loud, bright album.
True Colors, released in September 1986 on Portrait Records, is remembered for its title track — a No. 1 ballad — and for “Change of Heart” and “What’s Going On.” But tucked at track three on side one is “Boy Blue,” a 4:46 ballad co-written by Lauper with Stephen Broughton Lunt and Jeff Bova. Recorded between November 1985 and May 1986 at the Power Station and the Hit Factory in New York, with Lauper co-producing alongside Lennie Petze, it is the album’s still center: no bright horns, no shouted choruses, just a voice carrying a heavy feeling.
Issued as a single in May 1987, “Boy Blue” reached No. 71 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a modest peak that says more about radio’s appetite than the song’s weight. Its video was simply a live performance filmed at Le Zénith in Paris, as if to say the song needed no staging beyond the singing of it.
The album around it was a commercial giant: No. 4 on the Billboard 200, double platinum in the United States, some seven million copies sold worldwide. That scale makes “Boy Blue” more striking, not less — proof that Lauper could hold an arena’s attention with a whisper as well as a shout, and that the most personal track on a blockbuster record is sometimes the one the charts barely notice.