C major · Camelot 8B · 86 BPM
True Colors
by Cyndi Lauper
- 86
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 39
- Danceability
- 70
- Acousticness
Billy Steinberg originally wrote "True Colors" about his own mother, and Tom Kelly altered the first verse before the duo shopped it around. Their demo was a piano-based gospel ballad in the style of "Bridge over Troubled Water". Anne Murray passed on recording it, and the song then reached Cyndi Lauper, who completely dismantled that traditional arrangement and came up with something Steinberg described as breathtaking and stark. Steinberg and Kelly also wrote "I Drove All Night" and "Unconditional Love" for Lauper.
The song became the title track and first single from Lauper's second studio album, released in August 1986 by Epic Records and produced by Lauper and Lennie Petze. It spent two weeks at number one on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming Lauper's second and last single to top that chart, and earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Elsewhere it peaked at number three in Australia and New Zealand and number 12 in the United Kingdom.
Patricia Birch directed the music video, which received heavy rotation on MTV. In it, Lauper sings on a dark soundstage beside a drum, holding a black flower that a young girl on a beach takes before encountering two women drinking tea on a boat. Lauper appears in an elaborate jeweled headdress, lies on a white sheet pulled by David Wolff, and walks past schoolchildren in a skirt made of newspaper. The video closes as it began, with Lauper beating the drum four times in time with the music.
True Colors runs at 86 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.79 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 698 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.