Starfish and Coffee

My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually:

According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from real life, except for Cynthia’s preferred breakfast, which was actually starfish and pee-pee. That was a little too much even for Prince, though.

The song is simple-seeming, but as I was playing along with it on the guitar, I noticed something. Many of the main melody notes are in between the piano keys! That is, they are blue notes from outside of twelve-tone equal temperament. In my transcription below (based on the Sign O’ The Times recording), I color-coded them: the dark blue ones are between C and C-sharp, the light blue notes are between B and C, and the purple ones are in various places along the continuum between D and E.

The conventional thinking on blue notes is that they are a form of pitch play, embellishments on the “real” melody notes. But in “Starfish and Coffee,” the blue notes are the real melody notes, and Prince sings them with remarkable consistency. For example, there’s a clear contrast between the C/C-sharp blue note and the unambiguous C-sharps that Prince sings in the second verse. Listen to the line, “Me and Lucy opened it when Cynthia wasn’t around.” The word “Cynthia” uses the blue note, while the second syllable of “around” is a conventional C-sharp.

In addition to its blue notes, this tune also has some other blues-derived violations of Western European tonality. Listen to the phrase “to meet the teacher Miss Kathleen” in the first verse. Many of those syllables are on the note A, the tonic. The underlying chord is E. By the rules of Western tonality, A is not an acceptable note to put on top of an E chord, because it clashes with the G-sharp. You could get away with using A as a suspension, if it promptly resolved down to G-sharp. But Prince doesn’t resolve it. Throughout the song, he sings many A’s over the E chords, and never once sings G-sharp. These “note clashes” don’t sound bad, though. Your ear is primed for the blues, not for diatonicism, and in the blues, the tonic is a perfectly fine note to use over the V chord. Also, notice that Prince sings F-sharp very often on the E chords. Mozart might well use an F-sharp in that context to connect E and G-sharp, but in Prince, the F-sharp seems to fill the function that the leading tone would in classical music.

I did my best to transcribe the beat, but Noteflight doesn’t have enough drum sounds. I had to use the snare drum to represent the snap, the rimshot, and the reversed drum machine snare, and I recognize that the result is unsatisfying. Anyway, there’s plenty of rhythmic interest just in the piano part and vocal melody. The eighth notes are perfectly straight, but there’s noticeable sixteenth note swing. There are two chords in each bar. The first is on the downbeat, and the second on the “and” of two (an eighth note before beat three.) This syncopated rhythmic figure is ubiquitous in Black American music. The interesting thing is that Prince studiously avoids the “and” of two in his vocal melody, never once putting a main melody note on it. If you were to squint your eyes at the melody, its rhythm would be nursery-rhyme simple, but in its actual execution, Prince is constantly shifting and anticipating the accents, starting more notes on sixteenth note offbeats than on actual strong beats. It was a real transcription challenge!

Here’s a radial visualization of the second chorus in MIDI format. I don’t have anything profound to say about this image, I just enjoy looking at it.

Is this song a simple one or not? At the macro level it is extremely simple, an endless four bar loop on standard diatonic chords accompanying a basic major pentatonic riff. At the micro level, it’s richly sophisticated, with intricate syncopations and microtonal shadings. Which level do you care about? A Schenkerian would ignore the “surface” and sneer at the rudimentary interest in the “depths.” A lover of Prince like me would say, the depths are on the surface, and you need a simple framework in order for the rhythmic and pitch details to be meaningful.