Some songs have one life. I Drove All Night has had at least three, and the strangest thing about it is the order they arrived in. Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly — the Los Angeles songwriting team behind Like a Virgin and, as it happens, Lauper’s own True Colors — wrote it for Roy Orbison, and Orbison recorded it in 1987, a year before his death. But the world heard Cyndi Lauper sing it first. Her version, released in April 1989 as the lead single from her third album A Night to Remember, turned a dead man’s unreleased demo into a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic — and Lauper knew exactly what she was doing when she took it. She liked, she said, “the idea of a woman driving, of a woman in control.”
Written for the Big O
Few writing teams have ever run hotter than Steinberg and Kelly did in the second half of the eighties. They wrote Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Heart’s Alone, Whitney Houston’s So Emotional, the Bangles’ Eternal Flame and Lauper’s own True Colors — a string of number ones built on the same gift: choruses that sound like confessions. I Drove All Night belongs squarely in that run, and in some ways it was the most old-fashioned thing they ever wrote, a straight-ahead rock and roll song with no irony in it at all.
Steinberg and Kelly wrote from the driver’s seat outward: a singer so consumed by longing that he gets in a car in the middle of the night and drives through the dark to reach the person he loves, arriving while she sleeps. It is a man’s song in the classic Orbison mould — the same feverish romantic desperation that powered Running Scared and In Dreams — and Orbison cut it in 1987 under the guidance of Jeff Lynne, his future Traveling Wilburys bandmate, during the great comeback that produced the In Dreams resurgence and the Mystery Girl album. The timing is part of the tragedy: Orbison had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that January and was finally, after two decades in the wilderness, being treated as the giant he was. Then he died, suddenly, in December 1988, and the recording went into the vault with the rest of his unfinished business. His I Drove All Night would not be heard publicly for years.
Lauper, meanwhile, was rebuilding. A Night to Remember, produced largely by Lauper with Lennie Petze, recast her as a sleek pop-rock singer after the softer textures of True Colors, and the Steinberg–Kelly song was its engine and its lead single: all forward motion, a pulsing arrangement and a chorus that arrives like headlights. The album itself proved a harder sell than its predecessors, but the single outshone it, standing alongside follow-ups My First Night Without You and Heading West as evidence that Lauper’s late-eighties reinvention had real commercial muscle. She sang it not as a cover of a lost Orbison record — almost nobody outside the industry knew his version existed — but as a statement of intent. Where the lyric’s narrator sneaks through the night on longing, Lauper sounds like she owns the highway.
There is a reason writers kept returning to Steinberg and Kelly’s melody whenever a singer needed a comeback vehicle. The song is built like the drive it describes: no introduction to speak of, a verse that idles at the kerb, and then a chorus that simply accelerates, lap after lap, while the hook — the title, sung at the top of the singer’s range — does the steering. It flatters a big voice and forgives everything else, which is why it could serve, in turn, a legend in a vault recording, a pop star reinventing herself, and a Canadian diva selling cars, without ever sounding like the same record twice.
Top Ten on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Released in Britain on April 24, 1989, and sent to American radio the following day, I Drove All Night became Lauper’s eighth and, to date, final top ten single in the United States, peaking at number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and number five on the Cash Box chart; it was also her tenth and final top forty entry there. Britain matched the enthusiasm at number seven, Canada put it at number eight, and it reached the top ten in France and New Zealand, number eleven in Australia and number two on the European airplay chart — a pan-continental hit powered, fittingly, by radio. It finished 1989 inside the British and Australian year-end top hundred, even as adult contemporary radio, which had embraced her ballads, largely passed on the rock record: it stalled at number 43 on Billboard’s AC chart, a neat measure of how completely the single belonged to the highway rather than the easy-listening lane. The recording earned Lauper a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, her voice by now recognised as a rock instrument rather than a novelty.
The trade press mostly applauded. Billboard called it “yearning crystalline pop/rock” and noted the maturity of her singing; the NME praised its “modern European sounds” and her emotive delivery, calling it an atmospheric “night-time driving” anthem; Record Mirror heard “a punchy stab at power-driven west coast rock.” Melody Maker, the house sceptic of Lauper’s British coverage, dissented with a sneer about “a typically bland slab of FM,” but the balance of opinion — and the charts — were against it. The video, co-directed by Lauper with Scott Kalvert, opened with lines from her song Kindred Spirit and put her dancing in front of an antique car with film images projected across her body; the B-side, meanwhile, was a remix of Maybe He’ll Know, a song reaching back to her Blue Angel days — the past riding shotgun on the single that was supposed to define her future.
The Version from the Vault
Orbison’s recording finally surfaced in 1991, of all places, on Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin’, a Super Mario-themed compilation album, before Jeff Lynne built the posthumous album King of Hearts around Orbison’s 1987 tapes in 1992. Issued as a single that June, Orbison’s I Drove All Night reached number seven in Britain — exactly the peak of Lauper’s version three years earlier — and earned a British silver certification, with a video starring Jason Priestley and Jennifer Connelly intercut with archive footage of the singer. Hearing it reframes everything: the same words, the same melody, but Orbison sings like a man who may not survive the journey, while Lauper had sung like a woman who could not be stopped by it. The song is big enough for both readings, which is the definition of a standard being born.
Celine, Chrysler and One Heart
The third life began in 2003, when Celine Dion recorded I Drove All Night as the lead single from her album One Heart, wrapped inside a fourteen-million-dollar Chrysler endorsement deal that made the song the centrepiece of a car campaign. Steinberg himself had sent Dion’s label a copy of the Orbison recording; Dion followed his phrasing so faithfully that where Lauper sang of “the beating of our heart,” Dion repeated Orbison’s line — “our one heart” — which gave her album its title. Her version spent five weeks at number one in Canada, topped the charts in Flanders and Sweden, reached number seven on the American adult contemporary chart and number forty-five on the Hot 100 on airplay alone, and climbed to number two on the dance chart in Hex Hector remixes, even if Chrysler’s dealers grumbled that the deal sold records better than cars — the company walked away from the campaign while Dion kept her fee. A country version by Pinmonkey reached the American country top forty the same year. In Belgium the Dion single was certified platinum for sales of 50,000 copies, and in Sweden it did something even Lauper had never managed with the song: it debuted at number one. Few songs get to be a secret, a comeback and an advertising jingle across three decades; fewer still survive all three with their dignity intact.
The Song That Keeps Driving
Lauper still opens the throttle on I Drove All Night in concert, where it plays as a signature rather than a period piece. In the end, the song’s tangled history resolves into a satisfying piece of justice. Steinberg and Kelly wrote it for the greatest male voice of romantic desperation in rock history, and that voice’s version waited five years in a vault. In the meantime a woman from Queens took the wheel, said plainly that she wanted to sing about a woman in control, and drove the song into the top ten on two continents. Orbison got his hit eventually, and Dion got hers. But the definitive reading of I Drove All Night — the one that understood the song was never really about the destination — belongs to the driver who got there first.