Cyndi Lauper takes a 'Detour' through classic country

Cyndi Lauper is rediscovering her roots.

It’s been more than 30 years since the 62-year-old pop icon released her debut solo album "She’s So Unusual," which gave us timeless mega hits such as “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “Time After Time.” Fast forward and Lauper is on her 11th studio album: a collection of country covers called "Detour," which she’ll be performing at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor on Saturday.

“These covers (and this time in country music) is very closely linked to R&B, which is very closely linked to the birth of rock ’n’ roll,” she says — "Detour" is a spin on 12 early country classics. “It’s the roots, it’s the foundation of everything I sing.”

Lauper, equipped with a Queens accent thick as butter, also has a personality to match her trademark hair, currently a vivid shade of cotton candy pink. And when Lauper talks, there’s no disrupting her chain of thought. “Do you get what I’m saying, though?” she often makes sure.

Colorful, wild and charming. It’s hard not to get lost in her words, both in her songs and while talking to the musical chameleon, whose career has spanned pop, blues, rock and soul; she even had a tenure in rockabilly with an early band called Blue Angel.

“I cut my teeth listening to Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, even Dolly Parton,” Lauper recalls. “They were country, but they had that rock ’n’ roll edge to them. When Loretta Lynn came out with ‘The Pill,’ it really struck me that she understood a woman’s plight and I loved her. I just did.”

Country is in her blood—as a child, Lauper remembers listening to Jackson on one of only three radio stations at the time in Queens, New York. The new abum's opening track, “Funnel of Love,” is a Jackson remake. “Wanda Jackson was one of the first female rockers,” she describes. “When she was singing in that voice — they called it the ‘devil voice’ — it was actually rock ’n’ roll that she was doing.”

“When you look up the history of your roots and your music, you don’t find a lot of women,” Lauper continues, “but Wanda Jackson was right there, and she was right there in the beginning of it.”

She admires Jackson because it wasn’t easy for a woman to break through in rock ’n’ roll like Elvis did. “Had a woman been shaking her pelvis like that, they would’ve called her a lot of names,” she mutters under her breath, “which they did.”

As a woman in the music industry, you’re expected to look, to dress, to act a certain way, to uphold a demeanor of someone else’s choice. And Lauper was never interested.

“When you first become famous, with everything you want to do, you’re always threatened with the same voice: ‘YOU’LL BE RUINED!’” she shouts with bravado. “But you just want to be able to grow as an artist, to be great at whatever your craft is.”

“When (my guy at Epic Records) left in 1989, the new heads were looking at me saying, ‘What is that you’re wearing? Why aren’t you dressing more like Katrina and the Waves?’” she continues. “I would cry and look at Sire (Records) and be like, ‘Why oh why can’t I be on Sire!’”

With "Detour," she finally got her chance. Released through Sire, Lauper crossed off a bucket-list goal: working with Sire’s co-founder Seymour Stein, who signed legendary acts such as The Ramones, the Talking Heads, and at one point, Madonna. “Sire was there at the birth of punk music,” she notes.

When Stein suggested working with musicians young and old for "Detour," including Nashville Cats and Muscle Shoals members, Lauper was all for it. “I saw [Dylan, Cash and the] 'Nashville Cats' and I saw 'Muscle Shoals,' the documentaries,” she says. “I had my own documentary going on in my head, even though I wasn’t Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash, which is very disappointing.”

Lauper met with different producers to play out that documentary and decided on Tony Stein, because he “had good hair,” she says. “I was looking for a partner to work with and this partnership seemed to be a good one.” Stein, Elvis’ one-time piano player, has worked with many country greats such as Vince Gill.

But what struck her most about putting "Detour" together was the opportunity to record in Nashville. “I was too busy being famous and I never had time to do all these magical things,” Lauper notes. “Not that what we were doing in New York wasn’t magical, but the whole leaving home and going somewhere else thing was fascinating to me.”

In Nashville, Lauper found herself working alongside Willie Nelson (“I thought I’d cry, but it’s not professional, and I really do try and act very professional,” she admits), Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss, among others.

“Alison performed the yodels because god knows I couldn’t do that yodel,” she says with a giggle. “They say that Peter Gabriel learned how to yodel in three days, but it’s really shocking to come to terms with the fact that you’re not Peter Gabriel, either.”

Lauper is so passionate about her new record that she talks about it for more than 10 minutes straight without a single pause. “Did I kill ya?” she laughs hastily. “I’m sorry! It’s just that I’ve put together a thing that I haven’t carried for a long time.”

"Detour" — which she calls a “pretty package” — means so much more to Lauper: it was a reconnection to her past, but most importantly, a door to her future. “I always had a problem with myself because I wasn’t like Madonna, and I wasn’t like Prince,” she admits, also admitting to still taking vocal lessons three times a week. “My career didn’t take off the way Billy Joel’s did — I had my own road.”

The hardest thing for Lauper was discovering that road (“because you won’t be like other people and you think you should be,” she describes), but she found it — and "Detour" kept her going in the right direction. “After a while, it doesn’t matter what you’re told about what success really is,” she says. “You want to do something that’s remembered well, you want to add something (to this world), you want to feel the humanity — if you can — and that’s always been my intention.”

Lauper has finally found herself at a pause. “Some days you sink, but you try to keep the sink part down to a low minimum,” she says. “There’s always gonna be a road — sometimes you gotta make your own path, though.”

Cyndi Lauper

8 p.m. Sat.

Michigan Theater

603 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor

734-668-8397

$39-$99.50