True Colors, sung by Cyndi Laupar is one of those songs that is instantly recognised by practically everyone of a certain age and many more from recent generations. It was one of Cyndi Lauper’s greatest hits (Girls Just Want to have Fun being the other one you must have heard).
The song was composed by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, who also wrote Like A Virgin for Madonna and Eternal Flame for The Bangles (a real favourite of mine).
Here’s a reminder of the song:
There’s a lot to like in the performance and the production, as well as the lyrics. But what stands out musically? Well, a great intro for a start:
As you see, the bass rises from A to B to C over a repeated motif and then suspends on the F major chord.
The song is in C and in 4/4 time, so nothing to comment on there. The chords are all the obvious ones for the key (C, F, G, Am, Dm) and the melody does not leave the C major scale either. So what is distinctive? For me, what enriches the song so much harmonically is the repeated use of suspensions, where a note of the melody is held over from one chord (in which the note is part of the chord) to a second chord (in which the note is not part of the chord). This slight dissonance is resolved by the melody then dropping to a note that is part of the second chord.
Here are four short examples of suspensions in the chorus:
In bar 1, the melody stays on A as the chord moves to C major, which does not contain an A but does contain a G, which is where the melody goes next.
In bar 2, the same occurs as the E is held over a G major chord and then resolves to a D.
In bar 3, the A note is held over to the G major chord and then resolves to G. Interestingly the G chord itself contains another suspension adding a C note and then resolving this down to B.
Finally, in bar 4, we have something a little different. The D of the melody is not part of the first chord (F major), so this becomes an F6 (an F major with an added D). Then the suspension occurs as the D is held over to the A minor chord, resolving down to a C note, which is part of A minor.
What all these suspensions achieve is lots of harmonic interest in what would otherwise be a rather boring song. The composers add to the interest in several places by playing chords in first or second inversions, so the bass notes are not the root notes of the chord. This makes it much harder for musicians listening to the track to work out what the chords really are. You can see that if you Google ‘true colors chords’ and see how different each interpretation is.
