Billie Holiday / Priceless Jazz 31: A Time For Love - The Ultimate Romantic Standards / 1959
As Time Goes By
wistful, world-weary resignation shading into tenderness
A standard from the 1930s, best known from Casablanca, gets reframed by Holiday as a weary but tender assertion that romantic constants outlast personal turmoil. She treats the song's list of eternal truths less as sentimental reassurance and more as hard-won philosophy, delivered by a voice that has clearly tested them.
constancy amid change love as inevitable conflict nostalgia the persistence of desire romantic fatalism
Who's speaking
An unnamed speaker addresses a listener directly, insisting on timeless truths about love; the address feels less like teaching a lesson than reassuring herself, which gives the performance an undertone of hard-earned skepticism rather than naive romanticism.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as build an argument through accumulation: it opens with small physical certainties, moves to a description of love's contradictory nature (tender and jealous, needed and fought over), and closes by restating that whatever changes, these patterns repeat. There's no resolution beyond acceptance.
How it's built
A through-composed standard rather than verse-chorus pop form, built on a list-like accretion of parallel statements rather than narrative development. The repeated refrain acts as a structural anchor, and the piece essentially restates its core claim twice with the same material, reinforcing the theme of unchanging repetition rather than building tension toward a climax.
Section by section
Opening lines
“a kiss is still a kiss”
The song begins by grounding its abstract claim about permanence in a simple, almost tautological physical gesture, which Holiday delivers with unhurried phrasing that makes the truism sound freshly considered rather than clichéd.
Middle stanza
“a fight for love and glory”
Here the tone shifts from tender to almost combative, describing love as struggle and stakes rather than comfort. Holiday's phrasing leans into this harder edge, letting the words carry weariness instead of triumph, as if she's naming a battle she's already fought.
Refrain repetitions
The repeated return to the same closing lines, rather than feeling redundant, reinforces the song's thesis that these patterns are cyclical and inescapable. Each repetition in Holiday's performance carries slightly different emotional weight, moving from gentle acceptance toward something closer to resigned acknowledgment.
Craft
- anaphora
- The recurring refrain about time passing functions as a ritual return, mimicking the cyclical, unchanging nature the lyric describes.
- antithesis
- Pairings of opposite emotional states, like passion and hate, needing and fighting, dramatize love as an inherently contradictory force rather than a simple positive.
- aphorism
- The lyric speaks almost entirely in maxims and general truths rather than personal detail, giving it the weight of proverb rather than confession.
- synecdoche
- Small physical gestures stand in for the whole of romantic experience, letting concrete imagery carry an abstract claim about permanence.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as an argument for emotional continuity in a changing world, and Holiday's phrasing amplifies this by singing the platitudes with an ache that suggests personal cost rather than detached observation. An alternative reading hears it as pure nostalgic comfort, a list of reassurances meant to soothe rather than complicate — but Holiday's vocal choices, with their delayed timing and worn tone, tilt the performance toward the more melancholy interpretation.
Context
This is a cover of a 1931 Herman Hupfeld composition, famously associated with the film Casablanca, and by the time Holiday recorded it late in her career her voice had narrowed and roughened, which changes how the song's assertions of eternal romantic truths land compared to earlier, brighter versions.
Listen for
- the unhurried, behind-the-beat phrasing that makes familiar lines feel newly considered
- the shift in vocal weight between the tender opening and the harder middle stanza
- how repetition of the refrain accrues meaning rather than simply repeating
- the worn, late-career vocal texture that colors sentimental lyrics with hard experience
About Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made significant contributions to jazz music and pop singing.
1915 - 1959 / United States
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