Starfish Prime: '62nd Street'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

San Francisco-based band Starfish Prime has been influenced 100% by the city they’re from, says band member Joey Goodman, who has a background in jazz and an affinity for beatnik literature and “old hippie” writers. Half the band has Grateful Dead roots, while the other half, he says, has roots in jazz.

“I think if you move somewhere and you appreciate the beauty and the history of its music scene, then I think it’s almost inevitable that your sound will reflect its history somehow,” he says.

The opening lyrics of their song “62nd Street” have fog and buses, both of which are quintessentially San Francisco. They recorded the song live, Goodman says because they “like doing things by the seat of their pants.” And the meaning of “62nd Street”?

“I don’t know if this is fun to reveal or not, but the title of 62nd Street is a pun on 60 seconds, the amount of time … the fact that one place can, in a short amount of time, change meanings so severely. …  You can pass someplace and, in different times of your life, think about it so fondly or so regretfully, even though it’s the same place.”

But Goodman doesn’t want the listener to focus too much on that. He believes listeners can bring whatever meaning they have to it.

Starfish Prime are guitarist and lead vocals Joey Goodman, Nathan Kruse on keyboards, Ben Stolz on drums and Alex Wolfert on bass. Goodman and Kruse met as students at UC Santa Barbara, both of them jazz musicians who started jamming together. They eventually met drummer Stolz and through friends Wolfert. Goodman says they all get along great and that there’s no “battling at all of personalities,” which comes through in the recording of “62nd Street.”

“I think you can tell that we play well together. … Once the band knows the vibe of the melody and the words, we really just stay out of each other’s way, and we appreciate the idiosyncrasies each player has.”

You can see Starfish Prime perform live at Green Apple Books (9th Avenue location) in San Francisco on Aug. 24 at 5:30 p.m.