Memory

20: My Ship (1941)

This song is about how we got here.

NB. Major spoilers ahead for Lady in the Dark (1944) and Phantom Thread (2017).

I first heard ‘My Ship’ several years ago – probably Nancy Wilson’s very beautiful big band recording from 1963, whose choppy instrumental introduction soon settles into golden plain sailing. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics fantasise luxuries arriving from far away, which are as nothing without the delivery of a soul-mate:

My ship has sails that are made of silk
The decks are trimmed with gold
And of jam and spice
There’s a paradise
In the hold
My ship’s aglow with a million pearls
And rubies fill each bin,
The sun sits high
In a sapphire sky
When my ship comes in
I can wait the years
Till it appears
One fine day one spring
But the pearls and such
They won’t mean much
If there’s missing just one thing
I do not care if that day arrives
That dream need never be
If the ship I sing doesn’t also bring
My own true love to me

Despite its sun, the song’s story reminded me of Christmas, most likely because of the carol ‘I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)’. The nursery rhyme ‘I saw a ship a-sailing’, about a merchant vessel packed with treats and crewed by mice-sailors with “chains about their necks” was probably somewhere in my mind too: it appeared in ‘Ship in a Bottle’ (1974), the very first episode of Bagpuss.

With Ira Gershwin, Kurt Weill composed the song for Moss Hart’s stage musical Lady in the Dark (1941). Liza Elliott, ambitious and successful editor of fashion magazine Allure, is in crisis. Her doctor recommends psychoanalysis. In the 1944 film dramatization – one of the highest grossing movies of the year – Liza (Ginger Rogers) finds herself humming a phrase from ‘My Ship’ repeatedly: an elusive echo of a repressed trauma. Psychoanalysis allows her to recall that as a young child she tried to perform the song at a family party. Her self-absorbed mother, preoccupied by male attention, is indifferent; the guests are thoughtlessly unkind, saying she is plain. As a child, Liza begins to hate her appearance. When her mother dies soon after, she is unable to grieve. She tries on her mother’s special blue dress, and her father chastises her angrily: a terrible rejection.

As Bruce McClung writes, ‘I saw a ship a-sailing’ is “the song’s predecessor”; further, “the gradual decoding of what ‘My Ship’ signifies sustains the drama, a process like the ‘Rosebud’ cipher in Citizen Kane“. In relation to the song’s image of a ship bearing bounties, Lady in the Dark is also, mindblowingly, ghosted by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596) – a play that dramatizes, amongst other things, “the new set of economic interactions that accompanied the birth of capitalism”. McClung notes that Moss Hart’s own experience of psychoanalysis was formative of the story, but that Freud’s ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913) is what gives Lady in the Dark its structure. In the essay, Freud theorises the lottery for Portia’s hand in The Merchant of Venice: a choice between gold, silver and lead caskets, one of which contains her portrait. Like Bassanio, Hart has Liza select between three ‘caskets’ – publisher Kendall Nesbitt (Warner Baxter), actor Randy Curtis (Jon Hall), and her magazine’s advertising executive Charley Johnson (Ray Milland), who represent simplistically “the roles of father, lover, and husband”.

This film is a gorgeous waking nightmare, and watching it I was furious from beginning to end.

Amid the opulence of Allure‘s offices – the film’s lavish design and dream sequences subvert its maniacal heteronormativity – Charley attacks Liza continually, questioning her gender, sex life, and style, and brazenly declaring his desire for her job. When unusually she wears an evening gown on a date with Randy – a garment of sequin and mink that cost Paramount an eyewatering $35,000 dollars to produce – he jibes “you look wonderful – you actually look like a woman!” Her psychoanalyst Dr Brooks (Barry Sullivan) meanwhile proposes that, stemming from her childhood experiences, her distress lies with her reluctance to embrace femininity and “compete with other women”. Ignoring the injustices it so clearly lays out, the film egregiously weaponises psychoanalysis to confirm the “sex/gender system” and everything it supports. It ends with Liza agreeing to co-run the magazine with Charley, her literal tumble to the ground as he grabs her editorial chair for himself, and a kiss of unlikely passion between the two. This great review including on point picture captions (“Ray Milland is a shithead with a whip and Ginger Rogers is the lady in a cage in the circus dream”) fully has the measure of the film, as do these others on Letterboxd.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s extraordinary Phantom Thread (2017) includes ‘My Ship’. And Lady in the Dark seems to me to haunt the film in other ways, not least Freud’s essay.

At its conclusion Freud correlates the caskets to the mythological Fates (Moirai), the “three weaving goddesses who assign individual destinies to mortals at birth”, and thus to

the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman – the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man’s life – the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of a woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.

The relationship that Paul Thomas Anderson concocts between celebrated and exacting dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his lover and model Alma (Vicky Krieps) attempts to have this cake and eat it. So consumed is Reynolds with his mother, and control over himself and his surroundings, that he cannot tolerate interruption or vulnerability, keeping his shrewd sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) close by as his safe companion. In these constrained, even hostile emotional circumstances, Alma (‘soul’) undertakes to derail his “games” by bringing him close to death: she feeds him poisonous mushrooms, then nurses him back to health, thereby impossibly occupying all three relations. This sadomasochistic gambit allows Reynolds to let go, to fall in love, to commit to her totally, and they have their own child. And so another cycle begins.

Oscar Peterson’s performance of ‘My Ship’ plays in the tearoom in which Woodcock first encounters Alma as a waitress, where he orders a ridiculous breakfast. Learning of Paul Thomas Anderson’s passion for big band jazz, I’m convinced that the narrative structure of Reynolds and Alma’s relationship is based on Nelson Riddle’s wonderful orchestral arrangement: brass and woodwind signal ‘watch out!’ before the song moves to surging strings, the solitary multiplicity of Peterson’s piano, and so on, periodically undercut by ambiguous, if not outrightly sinister harmonic choices. Key changes mark new phases, ascension to new heights. It’s almost unbearably poignant but also weirdly unserious somehow. It finishes with a steadying rallentando and fluttering flutes: a happy ending.

Aleksandar Hemon in the New Yorker concludes that Phantom Thread is “nothing if not propaganda for patriarchy”, and for sure I agree that it is in one sense a deep stitch-up, leaving little room for its women’s own desires beyond surviving these conditions, and doling out punishment for their perceived infractions. But like the stunning arrangement of ‘My Ship’ that it features, it is laced with compassionate unease, skewering power and fantasy with a delicate comic touch.

17: Almost Like Being In Love (1947)

This song is about time.

Right at the beginning of the lockdown, having missed the start of the National Theatre’s livestream launch of One Man, Two Guvnors, a friend and I decided to watch Groundhog Day (1993) in tandem in our respective flats instead. Nat King Cole’s sparkling version of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s ‘Almost Like Being In Love’ brings the film to a close.

Lerner and Loewe wrote their by now much-recorded classic for the musical Brigadoon (1947), which received its pre-Broadway premiere on Groundhog Day that year. Over and above its lyrical aptness, was this choice a deliberate reference on the part of Groundhog Day‘s director Harold Ramis to the musical’s stage history? Encouraged by music editor Sally Boldt, Ramis resisted studio bosses’ demands for something poppier and more contemporary for the final moments of his film. Three months later, similarly distantly ensconced, we watched Vincente Minnelli’s film dramatisation of Brigadoon (1954). The song and this moment of calendrical serendipity only hint at the extent of what they share.

The golden thread that ties them together is their use of the single day as a narrative device. In Brigadoon, while lost with companion Jeff (Van Johnson) on a hunting trip in Scotland, jaded Tommy Albright (Gene Kelly) encounters the love of his life. Fiona Campbell (Cyd Charisse) is the denizen of an enchanted eighteenth century village that can reveal itself from the mist only once every one hundred years. Meanwhile, until he finds meaningful self-love, Groundhog Day‘s sardonic weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is condemned to repeatedly relive February 2 in the small town of Punxsutawney, whose annual groundhog ritual predicts the timeliness of spring.

‘Almost Like Being In Love’, Brigadoon‘s “only un-Scottish number”, places both punctuality and uncertainty at the heart of the experience of love. The full lyrics present a verse about the invigorating qualities of the Scottish Highlands and include the voice of the character Fiona, but the choruses, the basis of the majority of recordings, focus blissfully and more generally on the relationship between love and time’s markings.

What a day this has been! What a rare mood I’m in!
Why, it’s almost like being in love!
There’s a smile on my face for the whole human race!
Why, it’s almost like being in love!
All the music of life seems to be like a bell that is ringing for me!
And from the way that I feel when that bell starts to peal,
I could swear I was falling, I would swear I was falling,
It’s almost like being in love.

The present is of necessity constantly on the move. Likewise, the euphoria of love, which makes the person experiencing it a witness to their own self. These amazing lyrics achieve the perfect paradox of capturing the uncapturable – which may be why the final additional line of Frank Sinatra’s 1947 recording for Columbia (“In fact I have fallen in love”) feels so crashingly disappointing. (His infinitely livelier 1961 recording for Capitol, arranged by Billy May, doesn’t do this.)*

But what about the choice to characterise the music of life, which I understand to mean the divine energies that manifest as joy, as the sound of a bell ringing? With this phrase, modern timekeeping and the inevitability of wedlock threaten the song’s magical inbetweenness – reminiscent of the later lyric “get me to the church on time”, immortalised in My Fair Lady’s ‘I’m Getting Married in the Morning’ (1956), another famous Lerner and Loewe composition featuring bells.

Whatever. It’s hard to unthink these things, but to be honest I would rather focus on the song’s evocation of love as generous call and response, and music as sonorous vibration.

Still, both of these films are absolutely concerned with modernity – from the cultural and historical contrasts in Brigadoon between the villagers and their visitors Tommy and Jeff, and the screeching return of the two to a frenetic New York where Tommy’s fiancee (doppelganger of Fiona)** awaits, to Phil’s profession in Groundhog Day, which combines meterological prediction and small time celebrity and its discontents.

And the events that unfold in both rest on what modernity excludes. Magic isn’t supposed to happen in situations in which aeroplanes and cars are part of everyday life, and time marches forward relentlessly. Magic pauses that forward march, allowing different realities to emerge – the chance meeting of lovers from different historical times, a sequence of time that is endlessly replayed and reworked.

In this respect, these stories are both deeply theatrical too. Not unlike the weather forecast blue screen, Phil’s progress through the multiple reiterations of February 2 makes of Punxsutawney and its characters an ersatz stage setting for his cursed existential self-improvement – especially Rita (Andie MacDowell), the object of his desire, whose own kind self beneficently “makes him need himself”. Meanwhile, given the mystical threshold time of Brigadoon, Tommy struggles to take the reality of the feelings he and Fiona share seriously. As Serge Cardinal proposes in a wonderful discussion of the relation between temporality, music and image in Minnelli’s film, “music teaches him how to couple, to dance, in the deepest sense, with someone”.

When it appears at the end of Groundhog Day, ‘It’s Almost Like Being In Love’ sounds a bittersweet note. Phil knows Rita inside and out, but she, on a different temporal trajectory, hardly knows him at all. Not awesome in many respects.** But it’s also fitting that title lyric should become a hypothesis to be tested in a future that we won’t see. Set apart from the films’ narratives, the song expresses the radical uncertainty of all love as it begins. Worlds take on the character of contingency. These films literalise it. I said all this to my friend as we did post-match WhatsApp-ing about Brigadoon, and added that ‘almost like’ is just the maddest combination of words imaginable. “Which involves absolute risk”, he replied. “And all it is is… what you already hold, and is yours already.” So right. The beauty that lives in these films is how their protagonists move beyond fearful provisionality towards love for another, for themselves.

 

*Few recordings of ‘Almost Like Being In Love’ are as charming as Nat King Cole’s imo, but I really enjoy those by Beverley Kenny, Sallie Blair (“won’t you smoke the mood I’m in”), Chris Connor, Della Reese, Nancy Wilson, Etta Jones and Johnny Hartman. Michael Johnson’s takes the song in a unique direction.

**One million percent these are not feminist films. At all. Cf. the founding mythology of Brigadoon being flight from witches (Jeff: “Oh we have ’em. We pronounce it differently”), framing of almost every female bit part in Groundhog Day, etc etc.

13: Violets For Your Furs (1941)

This song is the epitome of shifting sands.

Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair wrote ‘Violets For Your Furs’ together in 1941. Appearing on The Rosemary Clooney Show in 1957, Dennis reminisced about the process:

Well this is probably the corniest songwriting story of all time, but my partner and I were sitting in the pub one snowy night back in New York and he was having a beef with the girl he was dating at the time. Sitting there just listening to a combo play the blues, and well, feeling kind of moody anyway, he came up with this song title. It sounded pretty good to me, so I just started working on the melody right there. Believe it or not he wrote the lyrics right on the tablecloth too, and before the evening was over we’d written ourselves this song.

The wintry context of its creation makes its way into Adair’s lyrics. A kind of theatre of memory, the song sketches out a scene between two lovers, nostalgically recalled by the song’s protagonist. As snow drifts down in the Manhattan streets, a man buys a posy of violets for his beloved’s fur coat, which has the enchanting effect of making the chilly situation seem like spring. The song concludes adorably: “You smiled at me so sweetly, since then one thought occurs / That we fell in love completely, the day that I bought you violets for your furs”.

On one level, it’s a simple story of a simpler time: men were chivalrous, women were graceful, furs were the height of sartorial elegance, and love was new. But even on its own terms, setting aside any questions that may or may not arise concerning ‘men’, ‘women’, courtship, and who can procure fresh flowers and furs in Manhattan at the tail end of the Great Depression, the song contains multitudes.

Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra recorded it first in 1941, in an interpretation that conjures divine dinner dances, and the giddy euphoria of falling in love. The moment on the Manhattan street feels like it happened just last week, but also that it’s yet to come. Meanwhile, Sinatra’s sleigh bell-sprinkled 1956 rendition – whose seasonal phrasing is taken by Barry Manilow’s recording – seems to look back to a happy event many Christmasses ago. Johnny Hartman’s extraordinary performance – a tribute to John Coltrane’s – is heavy with deep disappointment. Shirley Horn’s sublime version aches with remembered longing. Beverly Kenney serves up bright and naive entitlement, with a tiny hint of rage: maybe this character didn’t get what they wanted in the end. Stacey Kent delivers a poignant reverie.

Alec Wilder and James T. Maher delight in the way ‘Violets For Your Furs’ “moves and does lovely inventive things”, comparing singer and composer Matt Dennis’s writings to Johnny Mercer’s, which each “suggest the presence of the performer in their composition”. It’s so rich. Its embrace of then and now, whenever these times are in the universe of a given interpretation and whatever has taken place in-between, is magic. Even still, it’s comparatively neglected as a standard, with recordings only in the double digits. No films seem to have taken it up, although it is fleetingly mentioned in a scene in the ninth episode of cancelled ABC drama Six Degrees (2006-2007).

Is that neglect to do with anti-fur politics, as this piano studio proprietor suggests?

(On that issue, this highly specialised quiz about animals = in the running for my most favourite weird internet thing.)

Violets For Your Furs

Or is it to do with the somewhat antiquated ritual it describes?

This 2003 sinatrafamily.com thread is started by a forum member who can’t ‘get’ the song, and thinks it’s ‘asinine’. Her contribution prompts a flurry of rebuttals from fellow posters fantasising trips down all kinds of real and imagined memory lanes, some lamenting the decline of civilisation as manifest in casual dress. A lengthy discourse on hats unfolds. Its kind and friendly online banter is a world away from the cultivated vitriol of the contemporary social industry.

Violets Sinatra forum

These thoughts of animal rights, old school gallantry and polite conversation were front of mind as I wandered around the internet seeking out links to various versions of ‘Violets For Your Furs’. Seeing the cover art for Marty Paich’s I Get A Boot Out Of You (1959) took me aback.

Paich’s magnificently louche arrangement of ‘Violets For Your Furs’ on this album suggests lovers in smoky late night bars. The racy cover art is like a cutesified sexy and highly unsettling anticipation of the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

Similarly, Dave Brubeck’s Angel Eyes (1965) features a tremendous hard-swinging version of the song, and a glassy-eyed Terry Reno on its cover. Twenty or so years after ‘Violets For Your Furs’ was composed, second wave feminism was burgeoning, and at the same time beautiful girls stared out from a lot of cover art, in varying states of undress. (I’d call it Playboy-ification, but these album covers are ahead of the Playboy game.) Plus ça change, etc. Romantic love may be protean, and the gentle attentions of ‘Violets For Your Furs’ out of joint with the softcore objectifications of the 1960s. But the patriarchal structures that prop up ‘romance’ are doggedly persistent, for sure.

12: I Only Have Eyes For You (1934)

This song is a fantasy.

Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ for the movie Dames (1934), a satire on theatrical censorship featuring Busby Berkeley’s choreography. In context, the song is a sweet serenade given by budding Broadway composer and impresario Jimmy (Dick Powell) to his dancer girlfriend Barbara (Ruby Keeler). Their love story is a slight vehicle for Dubin’s intense lyrics. But thematically the song suits the film – a comedy of errors about gazing at beautiful actresses.

‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ asks how somebody smitten sees the world. Or rather, what they see. As the (very infrequently performed) verse has it, love is selectively ‘blind’, an ‘optical illusion’. The choruses describe how, to a person in love, all things – stars, gardens, crowded avenues – confusedly ‘disappear from view’. This feat is performed cinematically in Dames, which magically vanishes people from the street and the subway as Jimmy croons to Barbara.

The song’s massive recording history kind of reflects this disappearing act. There are plenty of straight ahead interpretations by jazz greats – Louis Armstrong’s story of gentle flirtation, Frank Sinatra’s confident seducer, Billie Holiday’s effervescent party-goer, coquettish Carmen McRae. Mary Wells gives a big Motown rendition, while Etta Jones swings languidly, weaving in Billie Holiday’s invented lyric ‘big, bulging eyes’ towards the end. But the haunting doo-wop recording made by The Flamingos in 1959, exquisitely arranged by band member Terry Johnson, has influenced so many others that it almost comes to substitute for the original.

‘My love must be a kind of blind love’, it begins. ‘I can’t see anyone but you.’ Having collaged these two lines from the verse to the top, this version then unfolds the choruses. Its mesmerising sound suggests being underwater, at the top of a mountain, inside a cathedral of ice. But its defining aesthetic characteristic is the cold – which sort of makes sense of the really odd apres-ski mise-en-scene of The Flamingos’ TV performance in the clip above. According to the YouTube poster, that edition of The Dick Clark Show was shot in the sticky New York heights of July.

There are also plenty of recordings that are simple covers of The Flamingos’ version – from Boyz II Men’s to Tashaki Miyaki’s – while others, like Catherine Russell’s, draw momentarily on its variation of the melody. Liane Carroll’s fierce shuffle funk interpretation is absolutely stunning. Differently captivating is Oneohtrix Point Never’s hypnotic composition, which seems to bring an android into conversation with a sinister gang of monks.

For ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, one of the finest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), The Flamingos’ version is pretext for and backdrop to its story.

The spirit of James Stanley, class of Sunnydale 1955, is stalking the school’s halls. He is compulsively re-enacting the night when, crazed with controlling grief, he shot teacher and ex-lover Grace Newman. Both spirits are possessing current students, caretakers and teachers, almost always resulting in a death. Buffy correctly and angrily surmises that he wants forgiveness, a recognition based on her own recent catastrophe: sex with her boyfriend Angel, which transformed him back into murderous vampire Angelus, who then promptly killed her watcher Giles’ beloved partner, teacher and Clan Kalderash member Jenny Calendar.

James calls Buffy to the school by night, where she finds Angelus lurking. They become surrogates in James and Grace’s unhappy story, which uncannily echoes their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM2eLr9nIsM

Following these events, Buffy, in shock, places the ethereal Flamingos’ record on a turntable, and gazes into a mirror, where she sees James’ reflection look back at her. But embodying Grace, Angelus’s vampiric undeadness allows both stories to be resolved. Instead of falling for the umpteenth time over the school’s balcony to her death, Grace/Angel returns, declaring love for James/Buffy and the shooting (sexual metaphor alert) an accident, releasing them both.

(Historical accuracy quibble: why not make James class of 1959? The answer is probably Back To The Future (1985). I mean, ok. But come on.)

In this phenomenal episode, ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ means obsession, grief, not-seeing, the same scene playing out across different bodies. Though different in kind, it shares spooky parallels with the song’s appearances in Dames.

First, Jimmy serenades Barbara on the Staten Island ferry, the Statue of Liberty in the background. Couples coo around them. Love is heteronormative sequence and sameness.

Later, extending the scene of Jimmy’s flight of fancy on the subway train, in which ads bearing women’s faces blend into Barbara’s, Busby Berkeley’s spectacular choreography presents a proliferation of Barbaras, suggesting women as interchangeable commodities, everywhere different but the same. As Lucy Fischer brilliantly puts it, the doppelganger girls’ ‘aimless, repetitive movement‘ embodies a kind of ‘zombiism‘.

The end of the Buffy episode sets all these stagings of surrogacy off. Buffy tentatively ventures to Giles: ‘part of me just doesn’t understand why she would forgive him’. Her sideways look of guilt reveals that really she is asking why Giles would forgive her. Anthony Stewart Head’s delivery of Giles’ patient response ‘does it matter?’ is magnificent. Anger, pain and loss commingle and dissolve in his performance. The scene evokes a unique unconditional love, but equally, how different stories of love can bear a resemblance.

11: For All We Know (1934)

This song is now, then, and forever.

The recording history of J. Fred Coots and Sam M. Lewis’s ‘For All We Know’, written in 1934, begins merrily with a version by Hal Kemp and His Orchestra, sung by Bob Allen. Its optimistic trills and honeyed vocals belie the song’s depths.

On the surface, ‘For All We Know’ is about a tentative encounter between two people, about to part on an enchanted night. One person speaks to the other of the fleeting quality of the evening and what the future may or may not hold, pledging their heart and soliciting the other person’s love. When Coots first heard Lewis’s lyrics, he thought they were ‘worthy of great poetry’, and promptly promised him $200 of IOUs.

The verse, as performed by Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Bette Midler, locks down the song’s story as one of romantic love (‘A kiss that is never tasted / Forever and ever is wasted’). (Susannah McCorkle and Gladys Knight’s alternative verse intros are variations on that theme.) But Lewis’s words in the choruses are nothing short of a meditation on human existence itself: the experience of love, loss, consciousness, and temporality.

For all we know
We may never meet again
Before you go
Make this moment sweet again

We won’t say ‘goodnight’
Until the last minute
I’ll hold out my hand
And my heart will be in it

For all we know
This may only be a dream
We come and go
Like a ripple on a stream

So love me tonight
Tomorrow was made for some
Tomorrow may never come
For all we know

My favourite versions as of now are by Brad Mehldau, Bill Evans and Jose James and Jef Neve, each one tender and devastating in its own way.

But given the sheer quantity of interpretations, many of them straight ahead – one even by Ken Dodd – it’s weird that the first one I ever heard, again and again, should have been Nina Simone’s radical 1958 reworking. As she put it to Steve Allen in 1964, she interpreted the song in ‘a hymn-Bach-like way’. In her arrangement, whose melody departs substantially from the original, the eighteenth and twentieth centuries touch: a reflection in performance of the lyrics’ attention to endurance and transience.

With Joan Plowright as an elderly widow and Rupert Friend as her surrogate grandson Ludo, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) does much more with the song than simply include Rosemary Clooney’s version in the end credits. Endurance and transience pervade the film: Mrs Palfrey’s recent loss, her arrival in London to stay long-term at a mediocre hotel, her daughter and actual grandson’s neglect, and her accidental encounter with Ludo, which becomes a tender friendship.

The film is uneven and sometimes quite strange, but this scene is lovely. At Ludo’s flat, Mrs Palfrey has reminisced about falling in love with her husband, including a twinkling nod to their healthy sex life, and days out in Beaulieu. Ludo asks her another question, and an unexpected, touching serenade unfolds.

In Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), set in 1971, Abbey Lincoln’s gut-wrenching interpretation is used repeatedly to speak of the dangerous tenacity of addiction – from the opening sequence, which introduces junkie Bob (Matt Dillon), sweating from a seeming overdose on an ambulance stretcher, to his earlier bus ride back to Portland to enter a methadone programme, to the film’s final moments, which return us to the ambulance.

The first ambulance scene, accompanied by the song, has an ironic, hallucinatory quality, compounded with a cut to a cinefilm of Bob with his crew of fellow addicts and thieves.

Later, Bob gazes silently through the misted, rain-spattered window of the bus at the agricultural landscape around.

Matt Dillon--Drugstore Cowboy

Adrenalised pharmacy and hospital heists, obsessive superstitions, and violence have given way to a more prosaic reality, which the film complicates with the lyric ‘For all we know / This may only be a dream’. ‘We come and we go / Like the ripples in a stream’ plays over shots of street drinkers gathered outside decrepit storefronts. ‘So love me tonight / Tomorrow was made for some / Tomorrow may never come / For all we know’ suggests both hope and desperation as Bob enters his new abode, the St Francis Hotel.

The last moments in the ambulance, as he struggles not with an overdose but a revenge gunshot injury from a dealer, make clear that Bob intends to abandon clock-time and production line work, and return to his life as a junkie. As Abbey Lincoln sings the song’s final choruses, contemplating the ebbs and flows of time and love, Bob explains.

It’s this fucking life. You never know what’s going to happen next. […] See, most people, they don’t know how they’re going to feel from one minute to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.

On his way to ‘the fattest pharmacy in town’, he wants to live. It’s an incredible use of the subtleties of this wonderful song, which can accommodate the paradox of hedonistic control as well as gentle acceptance of the future’s sadnesses and joys, which so quickly become the past.

7: What’ll I Do (1923)

This song is saudade itself.

What'll I Do 2

Its story of love on the rocks was penned by Irving Berlin, with the champagne-fuelled assistance of Dorothy Parker on its last two lines. Addressing their (soon-to-be) estranged lover, its protagonist contemplates a lonely future absent of their company. In this future, the other person is a long way away, in the arms of another. All that is left is a photograph and castles in the air. It is the definition of ‘”a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present”‘.

In a fascinating piece for The Atlantic, David Schiff talks of how Irving Berlin’s tunes ‘have a verbal tag and tell a story’, instilling in ‘common American phrases the nervous musical impulse of the modern city’.

Like many other Irving Berlin compositions, this song is deceptive in its simplicity. ‘What’ll I do?’ is its lyrical foundation. The boxy end rhymes of its two verses give a sense of stability – ‘divine’/’mine’, ‘mended’/’ended’, ‘bliss’/’kiss’, ‘descending’/’ending’ – which the choruses proceed to entirely undo. Internal rhymes surge through the choruses like gentle waves, softly eroding what formerly seemed secure. ‘What’ll I do when you are far away / And I am blue, what’ll I do?’ The only lines that lack these repeated internal rhymes are those reflecting on the protagonist’s memento – ‘What’ll I do with just a photograph / To tell my troubles to?’ The ebb and flow of the song’s emotion comes to a temporary moment of stillness with this melancholy image.

It’s been recorded numerous times in vocal and instrumental versions, very often with sentimental strings, as in Frank Sinatra’s 1947 performance. The major key and waltz time sit in a sad tension with the song’s sorrowful lyrics. But desolation and abandonment are not all there is to it. For example, Sarah Vaughan’s 1964 recording, arranged by Benny Carter, is razor-sharp.

What’ll I do? Immediately go on holiday, pound a bunch of drinks, and plot exuberant revenge. Vaughan’s sleek arpeggios are not really about pining. In this devastating live performance on her television show, Judy Garland makes an inspired lyrical adjustment following what seems like a pronunciation misstep: ‘What’ll I do when I am wondering how / You feel just now, what’ll I do?’ Chet Baker’s psychedelic interpretation, recorded in 1974, conjures a parallel universe. It’s beautiful, but I find it deeply antagonising: to me, this protagonist seems to be gaming his interlocutor.

I can’t remember how I first came to know ‘What’ll I Do’, but it’s highly likely that it was via the opening credits of the BBC sitcom Birds of a Feather, in which it is performed by co-stars Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson.

The series had originally used for its own credit sequences Bill Atherton’s recording for the opening credits of The Great Gatsby (1974), directed by Jack Clayton. The choice of ‘What’ll I Do’ for The Great Gatsby is itself a reference to the song’s own genesis: as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, Irving Berlin ran with a set that ‘often partied at the Long Island Gold Coast estate of Herbert Bayard Swope (a figure whom many believed to be the model for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby)’.

Atherton’s tender vocals accompany a gradual close-up on a newspaper clipping – Mia Farrow as Daisy – and a tracking shot of the dissolute, photograph-bedecked luxury of Gatsby’s mansion. The revised Birds of a Feather credits are likewise accompanied by the sweetness of strings, and a selection of photographs. But these are of the series’ two sisters, now cohabiting following the imprisonment of their husbands for armed robbery. And they are photographs of the two actors, taken at various stages of life, that appear to be genuine: Quirke and Robson had grown up together.

For both opening and closing credits of Birds of a Feather, only the first and last choruses are used, stripping the song of romantic association. It is possible to hear reference to the incarcerated husbands. But in juxtaposition to the photographs, it becomes much more prominently about the sisters’ relationship, and the sadness of their former separation through the process of adult life. The cinefilm that graces the closing credits is excruciatingly poignant – from one child’s impossible attempt to feed ice-cream to her bear, to their final wave to the camera, running up the grass into the future. It’s an extraordinary visual gesture to the final lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’.

5: Where Or When (1937)

This song is unforgettable.

Nora Ephron’s enduringly excellent romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally (1989), directed by Rob Reiner, hooks various elements of its narrative on a selection of jazz standards, including ‘Where Or When’.

The opening chorus of Ella Fitzgerald’s bright version cues the film’s early airport scene, in which Sally (Meg Ryan) is saying goodbye to her new boyfriend Joe (Steven Ford). There, she re-encounters Harry (Billy Crystal), who, passing by, sees former fellow building occupant Joe and stops for small talk. ‘Thank god he couldn’t place me’, she says grimly, glaring after Harry down the airport concourse. ‘I drove from college to New York with him five years ago and it was the longest night of my life.’

When Harry Met Sally

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote ‘Where Or When’ for their musical Babes in Arms (1937). In that context, the song is talking about deja-vu. Its verse makes this theme clear: ‘Sometimes you think you’ve lived before / All that you live today.’ The chorus, where most jazz interpretations of the song start, ponders memory: ‘It seems we stood and talked like this before / We looked at each other in the same way then / But I can’t remember where or when.’ Amazingly, the performance history of the musical has active forgetting written into it, having been reimagined twice with various degrees of change to plot, racial politics and line-up of songs: as a 1939 film starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and as a stage version created by George Oppenheimer in 1959. ‘Where Or When’ features in all three versions.

The song can speak of casual flirtations.

On Etta Jones’ recording, easygoing puzzlement develops into joy, like a chance morningtime encounter that becomes a day-into-night date. Frank Sinatra’s live take with Count Basie on the other hand suggests cocktail-fuelled and quickly forgotten nights of carnal enjoyment. But the song is more than open to less celebratory, more emotionally searching interpretations.

For example, Harry Connick Jr’s rendition for the When Harry Met Sally soundtrack – a set of companion arrangements for which he won a Grammy – is intense and melancholy. It proposes forgiveness, a deliberate reckoning with a relationship’s beautiful past, whose patterns are re-emerging in the present. As the teen owner of this recording on cassette I fell completely in love with its piano solo (here, from 1.57-2.34), rewinding it repeatedly. Bryan Ferry’s folkish version, featured on his album of standards As Time Goes By (1999), performs an act of tremulous alchemy, making of the song a dreadfully sad story of memory loss and partial recognition. There, the line ‘But who knows where or when’ possesses terrible tragic irony: in the scenario that the song conjures, the experience of forgetting does not seem to be shared.

Donald Shirley’s solo piano version, released in 2001, is something else altogether. In the wake of the release of the controversial Academy Award-winner Green Book (2018), various features have reflected on his body of work: a concert pianist confronted with institutionalised racism, Shirley created beautiful interpretations of jazz compositions inflected with classical allusions. A New York Times piece refers to Kris Bowers, composer of Green Book‘s score:

“‘Lullaby of Birdland’ was one of the first ones that I knew I wanted to include, because he starts off quoting a couple of classical pieces, and then when he goes into the song, it’s almost like a false start, because he uses the melody as the beginning of a fugue,” Bowers said in an interview. “He’s doing a proper fugue, exposing the subject, et cetera, within a jazz context. I listened to that and said, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard anybody do that before.’”

Shirley’s rendition of ‘Where Or When’ alludes poignantly to phrases and chord progressions from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor and Chopin’s Prelude in D flat (Raindrop Prelude). (These are the two I recognised; for sure there will be more that I can’t yet hear.) It evokes Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945), directed by David Lean, a film indelibly associated with the Rachmaninoff work.

Brief Encounter

Shirley’s piece chimes painfully with the desperate longing dramatized by the film: a story of doomed interwar love ignited between Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard), both of whom are married. Clouds gather at its outset. Snatches of melody promise to become more substantially themselves, but never do.

‘Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.’ In Shirley’s exquisite performance, the ghosts of an earlier composition haunt ‘Where Or When’. Meanwhile, on-screen, a last tryst in a railway station cafe is tragically, irretrievably interrupted; love begins in a bookshop thanks to a re-meeting in ‘personal growth’.