Songfacts®:

• Lauper wrote this song with the country singer Mary Chapin Carpenter. On her Hat Full of Stars album, Lauper covers some unsavory subjects, including incest and domestic violence. "Sally's Pigeons" is about a girl who dies from a back-street abortion. Lauper explained to The Independent: "We just put our ideas together. I grew up playing in an alleyway where there was a guy named Sally and he had pigeons. I had a Barbie and Ken like the onlooker in the song. And I had to take the wash in at four o'clock when I was eight years-old because if I didn't the pigeons would s--t on the sheets and I'd have to wash the sheets again. Part of the woman in the song is me - when I was a kid, things went on that everybody knew but didn't talk about."
• Cyndi Lauper has long been a pro-choice advocate; in May 2022, she attended a Planned Parenthood Bans Off Our Bodies march in New York City. Following the US Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade a month later, Lauper re-recorded a more wistful acoustic rendition of "Sally's Pigeons."
  
  "When I wrote this song with Mary Chapin Carpenter in 1991, we wrote about two little girls who dreamt of stretching their wings like the pigeons they watched that flew above them," said Lauper of the Redux 2022 version. "They dreamt of being free. But freedom then for women and unfortunately now comes at a big price. If we don't have control over our own bodies then we have no real freedom. We are second class citizens. We need to mobilize. We need to let our voices be heard."