Cyndi Lauper Had a 'Hard Time with Fame' After Her Debut Album in 1983: 'Scared the Hell Out of Me'

• Cyndi Lauper spoke about her rise to fame in the early '80s
• The singer called the experience "a hard time"
• "I wanted to do wilder things, and people would say, 'Oh, that's just strange,'" Lauper remembers

For Cyndi Lauper, burgeoning fame wasn't exactly fun.

The star opened up about the toll her early success took on her in an interview with Vulture published Thursday, Nov. 14. The music superstar, 71, looked back on her career and shared that she had a “hard time” when her debut album, She’s So Unusual, was released in 1983. 

“I used to walk, listen, sit, write, and walk some more,” she explained. “But once I became famous and tried walking alone, people would follow me. One time, a car stopped right in front of me, and all these people popped out of the car. Luckily, they just wanted autographs, but this type of thing scared the hell out of me.”

“I found myself taking off all the things that I collected and loved and hiding them,” she said. “I had all these feelings that were exploding in color, and all of a sudden it was like, Suck it back in, bitch, you can’t go anywhere.”

She also noted, “When I first hit, people took everything I was wearing — the color, the style, you name it — then spit it out and were onto the next.” She remembered watching a documentary about Steve Martin in which he described a similar phenomenon: it took him a long time to hone his comedy sensibility, but once he joined Saturday Night Live, everyone else copied it. “All of a sudden the culture sucked him up, spit him out, and went on to the next person. That’s how I felt,” she said.

Lauper also said, “She’s So Unusual shocked and scared everybody. They looked at me and were like, What the heck?” As a former art major, she said, she had her makeup artist do her makeup like “war paint,” and she deeply loved “color” and “vintage.” 

“Then I wanted to do wilder things, and people would say, ‘Oh, that’s just strange,’ ” she said. “That just made me want to do it more. Let’s go after it. Let’s do this.”

Lauper was 30 when She’s So Unusual was released; prior to that, she had spent years trying to make it in the industry. The album became a massive success, thanks in part to singles "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and “Time After Time,” and won Lauper two Grammys.

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In October, Lauper opened up to PEOPLE about aging and her farewell tour. "It f---ing sucks,” she said of getting older. “Like in ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ you could even say it blows!"

To keep herself from feeling old, she said, the key is to "take care of yourself.” "That’s the major thing. I try to force myself to do something — the bike, the walking, the weights, the yoga. Yoga’s great, because it just puts you in a zone mentally. But who wants to get old and decrepit? Nobody! But the trick is, I guess, not to get too decrepit."

But the Tony winner said she tries not to get too caught up in her previous accomplishments, either. "It feels like a million years ago," she explained of her early career. "I never tried to live in the past because I know that everything changes in the world and in your life. There are so many different chapters that not being able to open a new one is criminal."