Blossom Dearie / Blossom Dearie Sings Comden and Green / 1959
Some Other Time
wistful, tender resignation with an undertow of sadness
A quiet goodbye song from the musical On the Town, performed here as a hushed ballad about two people realizing a day together has slipped away before they could use it fully. Blossom Dearie's reading leans into the song's understatement, letting the repeated deferral of 'some other time' carry a current of quiet grief beneath its polite resignation.
the scarcity of time unspoken feeling parting and deferral bittersweet acceptance intimacy cut short
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addressing a companion directly, using 'we' throughout; the voice is intimate and conversational, and reads as sincere rather than ironic, though its determined cheerfulness feels slightly forced.
What happens
The song opens with a kind of accounting: the day is ending and the couple hasn't accomplished what they meant to, having spent it in talk rather than action. Each stanza catalogs a small failure or incompleteness, then resolves it with the same deflecting promise of a future chance. As the piece continues, urgency creeps in through mentions of time running out even as the speaker insists on gratitude for what already happened. The final repetition strips the phrase down to its bare components, leaving the postponement unresolved.
How it's built
The song is built almost entirely on a single refrain that recurs after each short observation, giving it a circular, almost ritualistic shape rather than a clear verse-chorus-bridge arc. There's no real narrative turn; instead the piece accumulates small variations on the same idea until the ending simply trails off on the refrain's final words, unresolved by design.
Section by section
Opening lines
The speaker takes stock of a day that has gotten away from them, framing the problem immediately as one of time rather than will. The admission that the day was mostly conversation suggests intimacy was present but incomplete, setting up the central tension between closeness and insufficiency.'
First refrain
“we'll catch up some other time”
The phrase functions as a soft deflection, turning disappointment into a promise. Its casualness is doing emotional work -- it lets both speaker and listener avoid confronting the possibility that there may not be another time.
Middle stanza
“just when the fun is starting”
Here the song names the cruelty of timing directly: enjoyment and connection seem to begin right as they must end. The acknowledgment that time is accelerating injects a note of real anxiety beneath the song's composed surface.
Closing repetition
The final lines strip the refrain down to its component phrase, repeated and trailing off rather than concluding. This truncation enacts the song's subject matter: time literally runs out mid-thought, denying the song itself a full resolution.
Craft
- refrain
- The repeated line about catching up later functions as both comfort and evasion, and its reappearance after every complaint turns resignation into the song's structural backbone.
- understatement
- Large feelings about loss and missed connection are expressed through mild, almost offhand phrasing, which heightens the contrast between what is said and what is felt.
- circular form
- The lack of a bridge or resolution mirrors the content: the song can't actually solve the problem it describes, so it simply loops back to the same deferral.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a meditation on deferred intimacy -- two people who keep promising more time together while quietly suspecting it won't come, a reading reinforced by the song's original stage context as a farewell between sailors on shore leave and the people they've just met. An alternative, less melancholy reading hears it simply as an optimistic, in-the-moment acceptance of life's limits, a mature shrug rather than a disguised lament; the lyric's insistence on gratitude supports this gentler interpretation nearly as well as the sadder one.
Context
The song was written by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green for the 1944 musical On the Town, where it's sung by couples facing an imminent separation. Dearie's 1959 recording, part of an album devoted to Comden and Green's lyrics, is a studio reinterpretation divorced from the stage scene, which allows the song to function as a more abstract statement about time and connection rather than a plot-specific farewell.
Listen for
- the deliberately light, almost conversational phrasing that underplays the song's sadness
- how the refrain's melody resolves without quite settling, mirroring the unresolved promise in the words
- the subtle increase in urgency in the middle section before the song pulls back to its calm refrain
- the way the ending simply stops rather than concludes, leaving the central phrase hanging
About Blossom Dearie
Margrethe Blossom Dearie was an American jazz singer and pianist. She had a distinctive light and girlish voice.
1924 - 2009 / United States
Full biography and catalogue