Watch Cyndi's Western-Themed 'Funnel of Love' Video
From RollingStone.com - By Jon Freeman
The premise of Cyndi Lauper's Nashville-recorded country album Detour is pretty simple: put the pop icon in a room with world class musicians and give her classic material to sing. The album's leadoff track is a bubbly, twangy interpretation of Wanda Jackson's 1961 single "Funnel of Love," which now has its own Western-themed video.
Filed at Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown, California, the video features Lauper giving an intimate performance and wandering the dusty streets like a glamorous cowgirl from a forgotten Western as she sings of her powerlessness against being swallowed up by love. When recording Detour, "Funnel of Love" was actually the first song where she was able to really connect with the studio musicians hired to back her up.
"From there on I was able to talk to them about, 'Well, all of them should be kind of magical like this,'" Lauper tells Rolling Stone Country. "Because that's a live track basically. That's even a rough mix, because it had something."
Lauper cites the women of country and early rock & roll as important influences on her singing, even before she broke through to mass popularity with She's So Unusual in the Eighties. For being a pioneer in rock & roll, Wanda Jackson was one of Lauper's favorites.
"[She] was a rocker and so of course I was going to listen and learn from her because I was a rocker and that's what we did," says Lauper. "I think one of the exciting things for me was I got to meet her when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And Mavis [Staples] and Ronnie Spector — I think we did the longest version of 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' imaginable. I couldn't believe I was actually singing that with them."
Detour includes collaborations with Vince Gill, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris and will be available on May 6th. Lauper will kick off a 19-city tour with a May 9th show at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.