Lynda Carter Has a Secret Identity (And It Isn’t Diana Prince!)

AE: Obviously, music is very important to you. As you said, it preceded the acting, and followed Wonder Woman, and you've been performing live all these years...
LC: I actually stopped when I got pregnant with my son. I'd been on the road since I was 17-years-old, and it's not a life that's conducive to raising a family. It ends up being all about the "current." It's not about the children.

Carter with son Lane in 2002

Photo credit: STEPHEN JAFFE/AFP/Getty Images

It's an unrealistic life, and I didn't want that for my children. By the time I was ready to sing again, it was just never the right opportunity. My son's last year of high school, he was about to be a senior in high school, so it was about four years ago, I got an offer to do Chicago in the West End in London, the musical. That really started everything again.

Alan Cumming and Cheyenne Jackson join Carter backstage for
opening night of her cabaret act at Feinstein's in New York (2008)

Photo credit: Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

AE: So once you got back on stage, that's what precipitated the CD?
LC: Exactly. My son was going away. I cried every time he mentioned college, I'd tear up. I realized I had to refocus on what it is I wanted to do. My daughter's now a senior in high school, and she'll be going off in the fall so it's been geared towards finding what I really want to do. That coupled with what opportunities present themselves. Just because I want to act again doesn't mean I'll get cast in all these great roles. It's in deliberate steps, still maintaining quite a presence at home in my daughter's last year of high school.

AE: Listening to the CD, and listening to you now, it certainly seems like this project was a labor of love in the best possible sense, and you don't have anybody to please except yourself. I think maybe that's why the CD is so good.
LC: It's also that I've sort of moved on with my performance. The more that I work with these great musicians, it's very inspiring. I work very closely with my musical director back in the day, and we came up with a lot of things together. I may bring ten songs to this group of musicians I work with, and they might do a track for me so I can see how it feels, and then, I take it down to Tennessee and we work on it.

So it ends up being something I'm having fun with because it's irreverent, or I always wanted to do, or I like the message, I like the way it makes me feel. I'm not so much doing my parent's old standards that have been done so much. It's a lot of songs that growing up I knew. I'm gearing more toward that kind of thing, as well as writing some. I don't know what's going to end up in the show the next time. I don't know what I'm going to end up with. It'll just present itself. I'm not really a genre. I'm more of an iPod shuffle – surprising things. I don't really have a bag.

AE: Thank you so much for speaking with us. The CD is going on my iPod.
LC: Thank you so much!

Lynda Carter’s CD, At Last, will be released June 9th. Visit Lynda online at lyndacartersings.com.