Summer Deep Dive: 'Time After Time'

Cyndi Lauper, Dotted Notes, and Miles Davis

Editor’s Note: This “Summer Deep Dive” was first published September 17, 2024.

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Time After Time

Today’s Deep Dive features a forty year old pop hit and its unlikely cover version by a jazz legend.

Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” is a nostalgic tale of lost love, “a suitcase of memories.” It was released in 1983 on Lauper’s debut album, “She So Unusual” which sold 16 million copies and generated 6 singles (“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” being the biggest hit).

The song has a very simple melody. The primary musical phrase contains only three notes (C, D, and E); its secret is a rhythmic phrasing that skillfully manipulates tension, release, and silence. Let’s examine this phrase, in notation below (you don’t need to read music to follow. I promise).

There are four beats in each measure; a dot on a note adds half of the time value to the note. Each of the first three measures ends on a half-beat (dotted quarter note = 1½ beats) which creates a tension in need of release. That release comes in the fourth measure in the form of a rest (silence).

Put another way, the rhythm of the song’s primary (four measure) musical phrase creates a pattern of anticipation (first measure), anticipation (second measure), anticipation (third measure), and resolution into silence.

The song’s musical structure thus manipulates tension and release amidst lyrics drenched in nostalgia and lost love.

Miles Davis

Miles Davis was sufficiently taken with “Time After Time” that he recorded it on his 1984 jazz-funk classic “You’re Under Arrest.” I have discussed how jazz musicians transform pop music in this space but here I need go no further than Lauper herself. In her memoir she said:

The most honored I ever felt was when Miles Davis covered [Time After Time]. I never wanted him to meet me either because I thought, if he didn’t like me (like most of the old-timers), he wouldn’t play my song anymore, and the way he played it was pure magic.”

Note how Davis expands the melody while distilling the rhythmic pattern to a short, stabbing phrase. Tension and release remain, augmented by Miles’ uncanny ability to manipulate his horn’s tone and volume.

Cyndi Lauper is right. It is pure magic.