The Story Behind the Cyndi Lauper Classic Originally Written for and Recorded by Roy Orbison and Released Years After His Death

In 1987, Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, the songwriting duo behind Cyndi Lauper‘s “True Colors,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Heart’s “Alone,” Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional,” The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame,” and a collection of pop hits, wrote a song initially meant for Roy Orbison.

Steinberg often came up with a lyric or phrase that would start off their songs, and thought up another during one of his regular drives back to the desert from Los Angeles, “I Drove All Night.”

“I did a lot of driving back and forth between Los Angeles and the desert, and I think on one of those night drives I came up with the title, ‘I Drove All Night,’” recalled Steinberg in 2004. “That song is another that I think has a really nice first line. It’s kind of hard to hear because an odd word is in it, ‘I had to escape, the city was sticky and cruel,’ and I thought that was a good first line.”

I had to escape
The city was sticky and cruel
Maybe I should have called you first
But I was dying to get to you
I was dreaming while I drove
The long, straight road ahead

I could taste your sweet kisses, your arms open wide
This fever for you is just burning me up inside

I drove all night to get to you
Is that all right?
I drove all night
Crept in your room
Woke you from your sleep
To make love to you
Is that all right?
I drove all night

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Despite being as different as “night and day” as people, Kelly and Steinberg had one thing in common: they were both huge Orbison fans. “We had, like most songwriters do, certain artists who inspired us and would inspire our songwriting, and one of those was Roy Orbison,” said Steinberg in 2004.

“When we wrote the song ‘I Drove All Night,’ we didn’t entertain any fantasy about Roy ever recording this song,” continued Steinberg. “We just set out to write a song sort of in the style of Roy Orbison. In fact, what I would refer to as the ‘B section’ of that song, the British would call it a pre-chorus, when it goes, ‘Taste your sweet kisses, your arms open wide,’ that part that lifts into the chorus, it has a definite similarity to the Roy Orbison song ‘Running Scared.’”

Eventually, the duo got the song in front of their childhood idol after catching one of his shows at the Hop in Lakewood, California, in February of 1987. “Roy was somebody whose songs just changed my life when I was a kid, so to have him standing there as a peer, someone I was going to work with, my knees wanted to buckle,” said Steinberg. “We walked into Tom’s house and there was the idea that we could write something together and he just didn’t seem to really want to start writing a song, so rather than write something we said, ‘Well, we’ve got a song that we think you could sing really well,’ and we played him ‘I Drove All Night.’ He said he liked it.”

A Cock Robin Reject

Surprisingly, before presenting the song to Orbison, Kelly and Steinberg first took “I Drove All Night” to Peter Kingbery, from the Texas band Cock Robin. At the time, the band was successful in Europe and had some top 40 hits with “When Your Heart is Weak,” “Just Around the Corner,” and “The Promise You Made.”

“Tom [Kelly] and I heard them perform live; they were just blowing us away,” remembered Steinberg. “At that time, they were managed by Jay Landers, who’s been very prominent in Barbra Streisand’s career. We heard Cock Robin play live, and this guy Peter Kingsbery had this great voice, very much like Roy Orbison; it’s a powerful voice. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if he would sing I Drove All Night’ so we invited him over to Tom’s house, where we had a studio.”

Ultimately, Kingsbery rejected the song, and it landed in Lauper’s orbit. “Peter was a good guy, a little bit arrogant,” said Steinberg. “He heard the song, and he liked it, but he said, ‘Well, I’m a songwriter myself. Why would I record one of your songs?’ It was a nice meeting, but he didn’t have any interest in recording our song. In the end, Cyndi Lauper snapped it up.”

‘A Night to Remember’

In 1989, a year after Orbison’s death, Lauper released her version of “I Drove All Night” on her third album, A Night to Remember, and went to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and peaked at No. 7 in the UK.

More than a decade later, Celine Dion also released a version of “I Drove All Night,” also used in a Chrysler car campaign, as the lead single from her 2003 album One Heart.

A year before his death, Orbison landed a contract with Virgin Records and was working with Traveling Wilburys’ bandmate Jeff Lynne on his album Mystery Girl, featuring his comeback hit “You Got It.”

Years would pass before Orbison’s “I Drove All Night” would get its release, while Lynne was assembling the 1992 posthumous album King of Hearts, and Kelly and Steinberg suggested reworking the original recording. “We gave it to Jeff Lynne, and Jeff rebuilt the track around the vocal that we had cut on Roy,” said Steinberg. “That was very satisfying for us.”

Steinberg added, “We had great fun writing that song, because it felt like it authentically captured the spirit of the drama that Roy Orbison would inject into the great songs that he wrote, songs like ‘Running Scared’, ‘Crying’ or ‘In Dreams.’”

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