Most of She’s So Unusual, Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 debut, sparkles. Its opening track does not. Money Changes Everything comes on like a bar band at closing time — a hard, snarling rock song about a woman who leaves a poor man the moment a rich one appears, delivered without a drop of sympathy for anyone in it. “We swore our love would last forever,” Lauper sings, and then the verdict: money changes everything. It is the darkest five minutes on one of the brightest pop albums of the decade, and Lauper did not write a word of it. The song began six years earlier and five hundred miles south, as the calling card of an Atlanta new wave band almost nobody outside Georgia ever heard of.
An Atlanta Bar Band’s Curse
Money Changes Everything was written by Tom Gray, frontman of the Brains, an Atlanta band working the same American new wave circuit as their Athens neighbours the B-52’s and R.E.M. The Brains released it in 1978 as a 45 on the tiny Gray Matter label, with Quick with Your Lip on the B-side. Gray sang his own song, as critic Greil Marcus put it, “in a strangled voice, as if he were trying to explain, but instead he laid a curse.” Marcus ranked the single at number ten in his Real Life Rock Top Ten for 1979, writing that “this damned single ranks higher than I’ve placed it, but if it were anywhere else I couldn’t end with it, and there’s no other way the decade could end.”
Marcus was not alone. The single placed ninth in the Village Voice‘s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll for 1979, and Robert Christgau named it the best single of the year on his Dean’s List. AllMusic’s Ralph Heibutzki later praised the song’s “sassy cynicism,” even while noting it was the band’s concession to mainstream sensibilities — which tells you how uncompromising the rest of the Brains’ material was. The underground heat got the band signed to Mercury Records, and they re-recorded the song with producer Steve Lillywhite — later famous for his work with U2 and Peter Gabriel — as the lead single from their self-titled debut album in 1980, backed on the reissue with Girl in a Magazine. The Brains themselves — Gray, guitarist Rick Price, bassist Bryan Smithwick and drummer Charles Wolff — were a tight, literate unit, but Mercury could not sell them. It changed nothing commercially. The Brains’ Money Changes Everything remained what it had been: a critics’ record, a curse laid in a strangled voice, waiting for a bigger throat.
Lauper Takes Hold of It
That throat arrived in June 1983, when Lauper recorded the song at the Record Plant in New York for She’s So Unusual, with Rick Chertoff producing. The album’s musical engine room was the Philadelphia band the Hooters — Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian — and the track carries their fingerprints all over it. Hyman guests on the record playing his namesake instrument, the “hooter,” a Hohner melodica, through the song’s solo, while Bazilian handles guitars, Neil Jason plays bass and Anton Fig drums. Where the Brains had sounded wiry and defeated, Lauper sounds enormous. Her version runs just over five minutes on the album, and it ends with the singer holding one sustained note through the climax until it feels less like singing than like a rope pulled to snapping point.
AllMusic’s Stewart Mason, comparing the two versions, judged Lauper’s arrangement “brighter, sharper and much more commercial than the Brains’ rather weedy, comparatively lo-fi and dullish take on their own song,” and singled out that long held note as the moment the cover becomes the definitive reading. Greil Marcus went further. Writing in Artforum in May 1984, the man who had championed the original declared that “Cyndi Lauper’s version makes the original sound compromised. She makes you wonder if Brains composer and singer Tom Gray even knew what he was talking about.” The curse had found its voice.
One reason it stings differently in Lauper’s mouth is that she changed almost nothing. The lyric is written from the abandoned man’s point of view — he took her as she was, at her word, and watched money walk her out of his life — and Lauper sings it straight, without swapping a single pronoun or softening a single line. Sung by Gray, the song is a loser’s lament. Sung by the most flamboyant woman in pop in the year she conquered the charts, it becomes something stranger and more modern: a hit singer inhabiting the man left behind, and making his bitterness sound like her own hard-won knowledge. She plays neither villain nor victim cleanly, and lets the audience decide who to blame.
The Single That Broke the Streak
Portrait and Epic took their time. Money Changes Everything appeared as a single in Britain in May 1984, but in the United States it was held back until December 1984, becoming the fifth American single from She’s So Unusual — behind Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Time After Time, She Bop and All Through the Night, which had reached numbers two, one, three and five respectively. In a strange twist for a studio recording, the American single was built around a live performance: the US seven-inch led with a live version, and European and Japanese twelve-inches carried mixes billed, with puckish honesty, as “That Live Version” and “This Live Version.” The song eventually circulated in more than twenty-seven different single variations worldwide. A video, directed by Pat Burch and Phil Tuckett for NFL Films — yes, the football people — entered programming in November 1984.
That the label was still mining singles from the album fourteen months after its release tells its own story about She’s So Unusual‘s depth — and the live recording at the heart of this one is a clue to why it was chosen. On stage, Money Changes Everything was Lauper’s showpiece rocker, the moment the clowning stopped and the band simply hit hard, and the single tried to bottle that: the European twelve-inch carried two mixes deadpan-titled “That Live Version,” at just over six minutes, and “This Live Version.” As a piece of sequencing it made sense, too. After a run of singles that showcased her whimsy, her romance and her innuendo, the fifth single was the one that proved the debut album had a rock band inside it.
The streak had to end somewhere. Money Changes Everything peaked at number 27 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the album’s first American single to miss the top five, and it reached number 37 on the Mainstream Rock chart. It fared better abroad: number three in Colombia, number ten in Chile, number nineteen in Australia and number fourteen in New Zealand. The British trade press, characteristically, could not make up its mind. Music Week‘s Jerry Smith reviewed the first UK release in 1984 as “weak US pop with a thin synthesizer sound,” sneering at Lauper’s “horrible whining voice” — then, reviewing the re-release in February 1985, called it “one of her more commercial numbers” with “bright, catchy backing.” Billboard had it right the first time: “hard rock meets hard realities.” Cash Box heard “a sad look at the realities of cash and its effects.”
Afterlife of a Hard Truth
Neither version of Money Changes Everything ever topped a chart, yet the song keeps resurfacing because its sentence-long thesis never dates. It kept turning up in unlikely places even at the time: in Peru, it finished in the year-end top twenty of Radio Panamericana, the country’s most prestigious station, and the British single paired Lauper’s hardest rock track with the album’s silliest forty-five seconds, the vaudeville snippet He’s So Unusual. Tom Gray’s connection to Lauper did not end with the cover, either — in 1986 she recorded another of his songs, The Faraway Nearby, for her second album True Colors, a small acknowledgement from a star who rarely forgot the writers she had borrowed from. Gray reclaimed his signature song in 2007, recording a new version with his band Delta Moon for the album Clear Blue Flame. Lauper revisited it herself on The Body Acoustic in 2005, in an acoustic duet arrangement with Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday, where the snarl becomes something closer to a shrug between two people who have both seen it happen. Modern critics have noted how neatly the song’s cynicism fitted — and predicted — the decade that made it famous; Classic Pop, revisiting the album in 2025, described the track as the Brains’ 1978 new wave anthem “cleverly repositioned” for the Reagan era.
That is the final twist of Money Changes Everything. A song written in the Carter years by a band that never made it became, in the voice of the most colourful pop star of the Reagan years, the one moment on her debut album that sounds like a warning. Everything else on She’s So Unusual promises that fun is a right and love is a lifeline. The opening track tells you the price of both, and Lauper — holding that impossible note at the end — sounds like she had already counted the money.