Following up a phenomenon is pop’s least enviable job. In the autumn of 1986, Cyndi Lauper’s second album True Colors had just sent its title track to number one — a quiet, hymn-like ballad that showed the former cartoon whirlwind could break your heart at a whisper. For the second single, Lauper and her label reached for the opposite gear: Change of Heart, a four-minute sprint of dance-pop about a lover pleading for one more chance, released on November 11, 1986. It is one of the most purely enjoyable singles of her career, and it carries one of the great secret-handshake credits of eighties pop: the harmonies behind her belong to the Bangles.
Essra Mohawk’s Song
The song came from Essra Mohawk, one of American music’s great nearly-was stories. Born Sandra Elayne Hurvitz in Philadelphia in 1948, she was placing songs with the Shangri-Las and the Vanilla Fudge as a teenager before Frank Zappa signed her to his Bizarre label in 1967 and put her, briefly, in the Mothers of Invention. Her 1970 album Primordial Lovers was acclaimed enough that Rolling Stone‘s Paul Williams placed it on his list of the twenty-five best albums of all time, yet her career kept swerving at the last moment — most famously in August 1969, when she was booked to perform at Woodstock and her driver took a wrong turn, delivering her to the festival site just as the first night’s final song ended. A generation of American children knew her voice without knowing her name, from her Schoolhouse Rock! performances of Interjections! and Sufferin’ Til Suffrage, and she worked steadily as a session singer for the likes of Carole King, John Mellencamp and the Jerry Garcia Band. Her songs were recorded by others, too — Tina Turner cut her Stronger Than the Wind — but when Lauper had a hit with Change of Heart in 1986, it became the best-known composition of Mohawk’s life.
Lauper, who is credited with additional lyrics, had form for finding gold in other people’s catalogues: Money Changes Everything had been a Brains obscurity, and True Colors itself was written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly. What she heard in Change of Heart was a pledge of fidelity dressed as a dance record — a narrator who admits the waiting has been hard, insists she is still standing in the same place, and asks only that her lover’s change of heart bend back toward her.
Lauper placed the song where it could do the most work: it opens True Colors. That mattered, because the album was her declaration of independence as a producer. She had originally intended Rick Chertoff, the producer of She’s So Unusual, to make the record, but the working relationship had turned problematic; she refused his collaborator Rob Hyman as well, and produced the album herself with Lennie Petze. True Colors, released on September 15, 1986, peaked at number four on the Billboard 200, was certified double platinum in the United States, sold around seven million copies worldwide and even outsold her debut in Japan. The European trade magazine Music & Media named it one of its albums of the week, noting that it began “confidently” with Change of Heart — and Classic Pop, looking back, called the track a “doo-wop delight,” catching the old-fashioned girl-group sweetness humming underneath the synths.
“The second album says, ‘Have the courage of your convictions and love yourself a little,'” Lauper told The New York Times in 1986, explaining that she wanted the songs to teach listeners not to be so hard on themselves. It was the credo of an artist taking control: she wrote or co-wrote most of the album, posed for Annie Leibovitz’s cover photograph, and collected two Grammy nominations for the record, for the title track’s vocal performance and for the rock performance of 911. Change of Heart, the album’s opener and second single, embodied the new confidence better than any ballad could — it is She’s So Unusual‘s energy, grown up and self-produced.
Lauper co-produced the single with Lennie Petze, recording it in New York at the Power Station and the Hit Factory during the True Colors sessions. The personnel list reads like a summit meeting. Nile Rodgers, the Chic guitarist then at the height of his powers as pop’s producer-for-hire, plays guitar. Remix king Shep Pettibone was brought in to mix and to build the extended versions for the clubs, with the Latin Rascals handling edits. And on backing vocals, Lauper installed the Bangles — Susanna Hoffs and her bandmates, then in the middle of their own imperial phase with Manic Monday and Walk Like an Egyptian — to cushion her lead in close harmony.
It was a generous and shrewd piece of casting. Critics noticed the effect immediately. Jimmy Guterman, reviewing True Colors for Rolling Stone, wrote that “Lauper’s trademark hiccuped syllables rest on a cushion of harmonies supplied by The Bangles and transform what is little more than a sophisticated rhythm track with nominal lyrics into a heartfelt declaration of fidelity.” Cash Box called the single “tough and tender” and praised its “punchy” guitars; Billboard heard “solid rock” that was “neither wacky nor idiosyncratic” — a slightly backhanded way of saying that Lauper, two albums in, no longer needed the costume to hold your attention.
Number Three, and a French Love Affair
Change of Heart debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 67 and climbed steadily through the winter, peaking at number three in the issue dated February 14, 1987 — Valentine’s Day, fittingly enough for a song about a heart changing back. It spent seventeen weeks on the chart, reached number four on the Dance Club Songs listing, placed at number 61 on Billboard’s year-end chart for 1987, and was certified gold in the United States. In Canada it peaked at number thirteen.
The international picture was gloriously lopsided. France adored it: the single climbed to number eight there and sold some 200,000 copies. Greece put it at number five, Chile at number four and Australia at number fifteen. Britain, meanwhile, barely blinked — Change of Heart stalled at number 67 on the UK Singles Chart, Lauper’s least successful British single to that point, continuing the strange pattern in which the singer Britain had embraced more cautiously than America grew steadily harder to sell there. Various territories received the single with different B-sides drawn from her catalogue: Heartbeats in the United States, Witness — the old She Bop flip side — and the rocker What a Thrill on British pressings. In the clubs, the record had a second engine: Shep Pettibone’s extended version stretched the song to nearly eight minutes on the twelve-inch, paired with his instrumental mix, and helped push the single to number four on Billboard’s dance chart. The album around it kept producing hits as well — Lauper’s cover of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On followed Change of Heart to number twelve in the spring of 1987.
Guerrilla Gigs in London
For the video, director Andy Morahan took Lauper and her touring band out of the studio and onto the streets of London for a series of guerrilla performances in front of bemused crowds. They play in Trafalgar Square, in Leicester Square — where a poster for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge looms outside the Odeon — in Covent Garden, and along the Queen’s Walk by Westminster Bridge, on the South Bank ground where the London Eye would rise thirteen years later. Keyboard player David Rosenthal and the rest of her road band mime along in the cold, and the whole clip has the loose, busking energy of a group amusing itself between arena dates.
The joke hidden in the geography is that Change of Heart was filmed as a celebration in the one major market where the single was failing. London gave Lauper a stage, a crowd and a skyline; it just didn’t buy the record. The video remains one of the most charming documents of her peak years precisely because it is so unbothered — a star playing for loose change in the pigeon squares, utterly certain of the song.
A Permanent Fixture
Change of Heart settled into Lauper’s catalogue as a fan favourite and a setlist survivor; a live recording was later released on her Memphis concert album To Memphis, with Love. When Essra Mohawk died in Nashville in December 2023, aged seventy-five, the obituaries reached for this song first — the biggest hit of a career full of near-misses, and the one that carried her name, at last, to number three in America. It marks the moment Lauper’s second imperial phase ran on craft rather than novelty — a hit built from a veteran songwriter’s demo, a Chic guitar, a Pettibone mix and the Bangles’ harmonies, arranged around a voice that could turn a rhythm track into a declaration of fidelity. Every revival of eighties pop rediscovers it sooner or later. The heart, as promised, keeps changing back.