1988 · Behind the Songs
Written for a box-office flop, remixed by Shep Pettibone, photographed by Annie Leibovitz — the 1988 single that became a hit everywhere except America, then vanished from Lauper’s own album.
In the summer of 1988, Cyndi Lauper was a movie star — or trying to be. She had top-lined Vibes, a comedy about psychics co-starring Jeff Goldblum and Peter Falk, and like every ambitious pop singer of the era, she recorded a song for the soundtrack. “Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China)” was released on June 22, 1988, on Epic, and everything about the campaign suggested a hit: a catchy pop-rock single, remixes by the hottest club producer in New York, single photography by Annie Leibovitz. The song did become a hit — in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, and Switzerland. In America, it stalled at number 54. And then, in one of the strangest footnotes of Lauper’s career, the song was erased from her own next album, as if the whole episode had never happened.
The film came first. Vibes cast Lauper as a psychic opposite Goldblum, and the production clearly hoped to do for her what Purple Rain had done for Prince — turn a pop star into a screen presence. It did not work; the movie flopped, and Lauper’s film career never quite recovered. But the soundtrack single had a life of its own. Written by Richard Orange, formerly the frontman of the band Zuider Zee, “Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China)” was recorded in 1988 at the Hit Factory in New York and produced by Lauper herself with Lennie Petze. At three minutes and fifty-nine seconds, it was a compact blast of pop rock with new-wave edges — nervous, up-tempo, and built for radio.
The single package was assembled with unusual care. The B-side was a live version of “Boy Blue,” recorded at Le Zénith in Paris — a gift to fans, and a reminder that Lauper was a formidable live performer. The twelve-inch featured remixes by Shep Pettibone, the remixer behind some of the decade’s biggest club records, and Phil Thornalley. And the photography was by Annie Leibovitz, already one of the most famous portrait photographers in the world. This was not a throwaway soundtrack cut; it was a full-scale campaign, executed at the highest level.
A hit everywhere but home
The charts told a split story. Internationally, “Hole in My Heart” was a genuine success: number 8 in Australia, number 8 in New Zealand, number 10 in Finland, number 13 in Switzerland, number 21 in Chile, number 40 in Italy. It even made the year-end charts — number 89 in Australia, number 27 in Peru. But in the United States, the single peaked at number 54 on the Hot 100 (number 51 in Cash Box), and in Canada it managed only number 86. The critics liked it — Music & Media called it a “nervous, up-tempo pop song” with a “Westworld-like R&R feel,” and Cash Box went further, declaring it an “instant classic.” American radio, for whatever reason, did not agree.
Why the disconnect? Partly it was timing: by mid-1988, Lauper had been quiet on the singles chart for two years, and pop radio had moved on to new faces. Partly it was the film’s failure, which robbed the song of the promotional engine a soundtrack hit needs. And partly, perhaps, it was the song itself — too rock for pop radio, too pop for rock radio, a tweener in an era that was increasingly sorting records into bins. Whatever the cause, the result was one of the oddest chart splits of Lauper’s career: a top-ten record on three continents that America shrugged at.
The vanishing
Here is where the story gets strange. “Hole in My Heart” had originally been slated for Lauper’s third album, then in development under the title Kindred Spirit with an October 1988 release planned. But after Vibes flopped, the album was delayed and extensively reworked — eight of the ten original songs were kept, new material was added, and the project eventually emerged in May 1989 as A Night to Remember. In the reshuffle, “Hole in My Heart” was dropped from the tracklist in most of the world, surviving only on Japanese CD editions. A single that had been a top-ten hit in multiple countries was, in effect, disowned by its own singer’s catalog.
It is hard not to read the decision as an act of triage. Lauper and her team were trying to relaunch her after a fallow period and a film flop; the last thing they wanted was a reminder of the flop sitting in the middle of the comeback album. But the erasure had a cost: it turned a legitimate international hit into a lost song, known mostly to die-hard fans and import collectors. For years, the easiest way to hear “Hole in My Heart” was to find the original 1988 single — a strange fate for a record that had done everything right except succeed in America.
The long afterlife
Lauper herself never quite let it go. Although she rarely performed the song in the years immediately after its release, it kept resurfacing. On the Australian leg of her 2004 At Last tour, she sang it a cappella — a startling, stripped-back reading that proved the song’s bones were strong. It became a regular feature of her 2006 Body Acoustic Tour, and she used it to open the 2007 True Colors Tour. Each revival felt like a small act of reclamation: the singer taking back a song the industry had filed under “miscellaneous.”
There is also the matter of what the song represents in Lauper’s larger story. The late eighties were a hinge period for her — the technicolor pop star of She’s So Unusual giving way to the more serious artist of A Night to Remember and beyond. “Hole in My Heart” sits exactly on that hinge: too polished to be a throwback, too urgent to be an artifact. It captures Lauper at a moment of maximum ambition, swinging for a film career and a pop comeback at the same time, and missing — but missing with style.
What to listen for
Start with the Pettibone twelve-inch if you can find it: the remix stretches the track’s nervous energy across a bigger canvas, and you can hear why he was the most in-demand club producer of the era. Then go back to the single version and notice Orange’s songwriting — the way the verse coils tightly before the chorus releases, the “all the way to China” hook that gives the song its unforgettable title. Lauper’s vocal is all forward motion; she sings it like someone running toward something, which, in the summer of 1988, she was. And listen for the production details Petze and Lauper layered in at the Hit Factory — the track is denser than it first sounds, with guitars, synths, and backing vocals stacked like bricks.