Songfacts®:

• "All Through The Night" is a love story brimming with the excitement of a new romance, a time when the baggage has yet to build up:
  
  We have no past, we won't reach back
  Keep with me forward all through the night
  
  It was written by Jules Shear, who also wrote the Bangles hit "If She Knew What She Wants." He penned the song in England while accompanying his wife Pal Shazar, who was playing some gigs with her group Slow Children. Shear explained in a Songfacts interview: "I went over there with a guitar and a little tape recorder and when they went to rehearse I sat there in this house that they rented and wrote that song. I wrote it really quick so I could go out and have fun in London. I was really good at making sure I had time to write songs. I wrote songs in the morning when they would go off and do their rehearsal and if I got done really quick I could mess around in London all day. I didn't even think about the song till I got home."
• This was the fourth single from Cyndi Lauper's debut album, She's So Unusual. What was so unusual about the song was that it didn't have a music video; Lauper was huge on MTV thanks to her hit "Girls Just Want To Have Fun." Even without a video, "All Through The Night" went to #5 in the US, proving that Lauper was more than just a video star.
• Jules Shear released the original version of the song in 1983 on his first solo album, Watch Dog. His version has a jaunty tempo, the work of producer Todd Rundgren. Shear wasn't thrilled with the production, but deferred to Rundgren. "He had an idea that it should have the feel that it had on the record, which I really didn't think was necessarily the best feel, but I thought, well, it's fine," Shear said. "Whatever he wants to do is fine. So I just did it the way Todd wanted to do it."
• Shear knew Cyndi Lauper's producer, Rick Chertoff, from his time in the cult favorite band Jules and the Polar Bears. Chertoff brought the song to Lauper, who loved it. Not only did she want to record the song, she wanted to write with Shear; they got together and wrote two songs: "I'll Kiss You," which went on Lauper's She's So Unusual album, and "Steady" which went to Shear for Watch Dog.
• When the song reached #5 in the Hot 100, Lauper became the first woman in the history of the chart to take four singles from the same album to the Top 5. They are:
  
  "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" - #2
  "Time After Time" - #1
  "She Bop" - #3
  "All Through The Night" - #5
• Jules Shear did all the background vocal parts. Lauper had changed the song a great deal by the time they recorded it at the studio, turning what was a mid-tempo folk-rock tune into a pop ballad. "It's still the same song, but the arrangement's different," he told Songfacts. "The first time I heard it was when I went to sing it. It sounded good to me. I figured, if that's the way she wants to do it, that's the way she wants to do it. I never had any problem if anybody wants to do any of my songs any way in particular. That's up to them. That's not for me to decide. So I would never say, 'Oh, that's the wrong way to do it,' or something like that. That would never happen. It just sounded fine to me. And when I put the background vocals on, it sounded even better."
• This was the first big hit Jules Shear was involved with, but it didn't faze him. "Having a hit didn't really change my writing thing at all," he said. "I was always pretty disciplined at it. It's a simple thing to write songs and not get involved in the other aspects of it. It doesn't necessarily make you any money, but as long as one of them pops through every once in a while, everything's fine. It's definitely good that Cyndi recorded 'All Through the Night.' It's great that it was a big hit and all that. But I didn't really have much to do with it, except writing the song. I made some money off it. I definitely made money off of it. I bought a house. I'm still making money to this day from it. A certain amount goes into my account every six months. It's not exactly the same, but it doesn't fluctuate that much."
• The Greek chanteuse Nana Mouskouri not only did a cover of this song but also recorded versions in French and German. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Jerro - New Alexandria, PA