Cyndi Lauper has gone back to an unfinished song from the True Colors sessions, completing The River Cried for the album’s 40th anniversary edition after Patty Smyth recorded the song in 1987.
by Paul Cashmere
Cyndi Lauper has released The River Cried, a song she began recording during the sessions for her 1986 album True Colors but left unfinished and off the final record. Forty years later, Lauper returned to the song and completed it for the newly released True Colors: 40th Anniversary Expanded Edition, giving a song written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly its first official Lauper release.
The story of The River Cried is unusual because Lauper is not the first artist to release the song. Patty Smyth recorded it for her 1987 debut solo album Never Enough, making her version the first officially released recording of the Steinberg and Kelly composition. Smyth’s album credits the two songwriters and places The River Cried as its fifth track.
Lauper’s version remained unheard for almost four decades. In a statement accompanying the anniversary project, she explained that the song was one of the tracks she and her collaborators had to leave off True Colors in 1986. The 40th anniversary provided an opportunity to return to the recording and finish it.
That makes The River Cried more than another archive discovery. It is a piece of the True Colors creative process that has now been completed by the artist for whom it was originally intended.
The song was written by Steinberg and Kelly, the songwriting team behind True Colors itself. Their composition had therefore already been part of the musical world Lauper was creating around her second studio album, but it ultimately did not make the original 10-track sequence.
Instead, the song found its first public life through Smyth. Her Never Enough album was released in 1987 after the break-up of Scandal, with Rick Chertoff and William Wittman producing. The record also included Smyth’s version of Tom Waits’ Downtown Train, but The River Cried was an original Steinberg and Kelly composition.
The Lauper recording now sits directly after the original True Colors album on the digital anniversary edition, followed by her previously unreleased version of The Beatles’ Across The Universe. Apple Music lists The River Cried at track 11 and Across The Universe at track 12, expanding the original album with two recordings from the era.
Lauper’s comments also give the project a personal historical dimension. She said she wanted to revisit the musical range of True Colors and described the anniversary as an opportunity to return to unfinished material. She also noted that she had found the mastered version of Across The Universe and recovered recordings from her 1987 Paris performance.
The wider anniversary collection places The River Cried alongside live material recorded at Le Zénith in Paris on March 12, 1987. The concert recordings include True Colors songs such as Change of Heart, Boy Blue, Calm Inside the Storm, 911 and One Track Mind, as well as songs from Lauper’s earlier catalogue including The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough, She Bop, Time After Time and Girls Just Want To Have Fun.
The digital edition contains 29 tracks in total, combining the original album, the two previously unreleased studio recordings and the Paris concert. The physical version will follow as a limited-edition two-LP release on December 4, 2026. The vinyl edition includes The River Cried and selected performances from the Paris concert.
There is also a poignant connection to the songwriting history behind the project. Lauper said the anniversary release was particularly meaningful following the deaths of Lennie Petze and Billy Steinberg in 2026. Steinberg’s death gives The River Cried an additional archival significance, preserving a collaboration from the True Colors period while finally completing a song that had remained unfinished for decades.
For listeners familiar with Patty Smyth’s 1987 recording, Lauper’s release offers a rare opportunity to hear the song returned to the artist and album era for which it was originally intended. What was once an omitted True Colors session recording is now officially part of the album’s history, 40 years after it was first left behind.
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