A title borrowed from a television listing
A soft drum pattern and a keyboard figure begin like a clock in another room, and Cyndi Lauper’s voice enters without costume, lying in bed, listening, already promising to catch someone if they fall.
She wrote Time After Time with Rob Hyman of the Hooters at the end of the sessions for She’s So Unusual, at the Record Plant in New York, Rick Chertoff producing. The other singles, the funny ones, were already in the can. Chertoff wanted one more song. Hyman sat at the piano. Lauper had a title she had seen in TV Guide, a 1979 science-fiction film, and she meant it as a placeholder, something to sing until a real name appeared. Every time she tried to take it out, the song fell apart. The lyric came from both of their bruised relationships, a suitcase of memories, a clock smashed and replaced by a louder one, the second hand unwinding. Hyman plays and sings the harmony you hear. The single came out in 1984 and went to No. 1 in America. It was the ballad that stopped people filing her under novelty.
She has told the Library of Congress the practical magic of it. The title was a movie in a magazine. She did not plan to keep it. Then she could not remove it. At one point, she said, it felt like a hand on her shoulder, and she wrote the promise: if you fall, I will catch you. Hyman remembers the chorus starting faster, almost reggae, and slowing into the bittersweet thing as the words arrived. The record is nearly a first take, which you can hear in the way her voice risks a crack and does not repair it. Chertoff left the crack in. Pop in 1984 was full of armour. This song took hers off.
I had this title, Time After Time. I took it from a TV Guide, a title of a movie. I didn’t really plan to use it. Then I couldn’t take it out.
(Cyndi Lauper, Library of Congress)
Other artists walked in afterwards, Miles Davis among them, and found a standard hiding in a debut album. The covers tend to slow it further, to make it nightclub. The original is still a little awkward, a little bright, a New York studio at the end of a long record, two writers who were both losing someone. Lauper sings it live as the moment the show stops joking. The hair can be any colour. The promise stays. If you are lost, you can look, and you will find me. It is a large promise. The melody makes it sound possible, which is either comfort or a beautiful lie, and the song is adult enough to be both.
What remains is the clock. Not the sci-fi film, which almost nobody connects to the chorus anymore, but the second hand in the lyric, time moving while two people fail to hold still. Hyman’s keyboard figure is that hand. Lauper’s voice is the person watching it. A title stolen from a listings page became the most serious thing on a record the public thought was a party. She kept the joke songs. She also kept this, the one she nearly renamed, and could not, because the name had already become the feeling.
