This beautiful song has a dark heart.

Shirley Horn’s dreamy version, recorded in 1963, leads the listener gently into the woods: an idle fantasy about a man encountered by chance escalates to stalkerish obsession. Her phenomenal interpretation of this song made me want to start this blog.

Yikes, I thought, when I first listened to it in 2014. The character is decisive, even powerful, which makes it all the more unsettling. At the time I was reading Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970), which may or may not have had something to do with how I received it.

It wasn’t initially written to be sung by a woman.

‘My Future Just Passed’ was written by Richard A. Whiting and George Marion Jr. for musical comedy film Safety in Numbers (1930). The musical linchpin of the film, the song features as an instrumental overture accompanying the opening credits, and as a duet between its romantic protagonists.

Naive young heir William Butler Reynolds (Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers) arrives to New York City from the west, packed off by his uncle (Richard Tucker) to gain some practical knowledge of life. As he explains to his nephew in not so many words, the aim is to ensure that he doesn’t ultimately piss all of his gigantic fortune up the wall in nightclubs when he comes of age. In a letter, the uncle tasks Jacqueline (Kathryn Crawford), Maxine (Josephine Dunn) and Pauline (Carole Lombard), three Follies chorus girls, with introducing him to the city.

The girls cohabit stylishly in a palatial Art Deco apartment with two servants. (The IMDb bio of Louise Beavers, who plays housekeeper Messalina, is amazing reading.) Their guest immediately demonstrates his maximal unworldliness. He drops his entire allowance on gifts of jewellery for them all, is unable to recognise a bra when confronted with one resting on a chair, and so on. But suddenly he discovers untapped Casanova potential, charming each girl in turn through song. They duly fight over him, abandoning their urbane shrewdness, yet also band together to protect him from the advances of other predatory chorus girls.

In a move that is only surprising if you forget that the film is basically about heteronormative training, these independent performers also allow the inexperienced youth to negotiate salary on their behalf with their show’s producer.

Safety in Numbers inevitably resolves with a match: though barely any conversation seems to have been exchanged, Reynolds and Jacqueline have fallen in love.

‘My Future Just Passed’ is Reynolds’ declaration of love for Jacqueline, followed by her mournful solo reply (here, at 1:04:55). The first chorus’ stride piano is laden with sentimentality. The song overall is anodyne. The film has made Reynolds the centre of its universe, and the girls orbit around him, so this is standard love story stuff: boy pledges undying affection to vacillating girl, and he will sever her existing “ties”, win out for sure.

In the year in which the film came out, Annette Hanshaw released a single version of ‘My Future Just Passed’ that combines Reynolds’ lyrics with additional choruses. Shirley Horn’s much later version uses these additional lyrics, but removes the cheeky verse about playing the field as a young person, and the chorus with references to school.

In Hanshaw’s version, the inclusion of the verse sets the song up as a tongue-in-cheek story of teenage flirtation and preoccupation. Her wry performance refuses to take the song’s romantic narrative seriously. She concludes the whole thing archly with a catlike ‘that’s all!’ Compared to the film’s presentation of the song, this rendition is positively subversive.

Meanwhile, Shirley Horn’s interpretation puts blissful instrumentation next to fatalistic obsession. We get to listen in on her character’s dicey inner life in the midst of sweeping strings. This juxtaposition makes the song’s theatrical metaphors pop. “Ring down the curtain, I’m certain at present / My future just passed” and “Here are my arms, may he find illusion there / Kiss my two lips, remove all the rouge on there”, sung by Horn with languid smoothness, troublingly emphasise the constructed relation between femininity and artifice. Magical thinking, manipulation, and a hopeful wish for the physical contact that would wipe lipstick traces clean away: pretty bleak. A dark heart, but so beautiful.