11 June 2025
Artist: NELSON SOBRAL
Who: Singer-songwriter-guitarist hailing from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, equally inspired
by the vast, wide open spaces of the country he calls home and the labyrinthine maze of the city in which he resides. Sobral’s music is as much Americana and blues as it is soul and rock’n’roll, perfectly balanced with the energy and sound of each of his respective influences.
Sobral‘s cover of Cyndi Lauper‘s (now 71) supreme 1984 classic Time After Time (more than 1 billion streams on Spotify) is a soulful and enticing accomplishment. A gripping vocal performance, bringing the emotive timbre of the sublime voices of Springsteen and Seger to mind.
On this very day – June 9 – in 1984, Lauper started a two-week
No. 1 run on the US Singles Charts with Time After Time.
Sobral: “I play a lot of cover gigs, part of the job. Some songs I play straight. Others, I bend until they feel like they came outta me. Cyndi Lauper’s classic “Time After Time” is one of those. It started out as just another tune in the set. But night after night, it kept landing differently. Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a cover and started feeling like mine, like something I might’ve written. It’s about taking an already powerful song and saying it in my
own voice.”
NELSON SOBRAL
CYNDI LAUPER