I had a request from Doug to play There Will Never Be Another You, a Harry Warren and Mack Gordon song that was written for the 1942 film Iceland and has since become a solid standard and a staple of the jazz repertoire as well.

Warren, born Salvatore Guaragna, has probably not received the recognition he deserves as one of the great American song writers.  But consider these titles: At Last, I Had the Craziest Dream, The More I See You, Serenade in Blue, September in the Rain… Not bad at all and that’s just a sample.  He also wrote I’ll String Along with You, a past Weekly Tune.

I don’t know the verse to There Will Never Be Another You, but its lyrics talk about this being the last dance before we part etc.  This only partially explains the enigma of the refrain’s lyrics which, if you gloss them, tend to a kind of time warped present tense-future-tense-conditional- subjunctive chaos, but never mind.  They paint a picture of simultaneous celebration and fatalistic doom, which may account for why the song works either slow or fast.  The melody sounds happy to me, but the lyrics are emotionally ambivalent.  Bittersweet, I guess.

Warren had a gift for a fine melody and this song is additionally so fraught with harmonic possibilities that I never feel I’ve quite done it justice.  This run-through is no exception:  not quite what I was aiming for when I started out, but it will have to do for now. 

There will be many other nights like this,

And I’ll be standing here with someone new,

There will be other songs to sing,

Another fall, another spring,

But there will never be another you.

There will be other lips that I may kiss,

But they won’t thrill me like yours used to do,

Yes, I may dream a million dreams,

But how can they come true,

If there will never ever be another you?