Carmen McRae / The Great American Songbook (Live) / 1972
What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life
tender, unguarded, quietly insistent
A direct, unadorned marriage proposal set to Michel Legrand's melody, this Alan and Marilyn Bergman lyric asks a single sweeping question and spends the rest of the song answering it with images of totality: every season, every light, every year. Carmen McRae's live 1972 reading treats the song less as sentimental pledge than as something closer to a spoken vow, her behind-the-beat phrasing letting the words land like conversation rather than declaration.
devotion permanence domestic intimacy time and mortality commitment as totality
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a beloved directly, proposing a shared future; the address is intimate and singular, with no indication the listener should doubt the sincerity, though McRae's phrasing adds a knowing, adult weight rather than youthful giddiness.
What happens
The song opens with a question about the totality of a life, then narrows that abstraction into concrete units of time -- seasons, days, coins spent. It moves from external measures of time to internal, private ones (a face in different lights, a silent birthday wish, sleep and waking), suggesting the request is not just for years but for interior access to the other person. It closes by folding the future back into memory, imagining looking back on an entire life and finding it synonymous with the beloved.
How it's built
Built on a repeating verse-and-refrain pattern with only slight lyric variation on repeat, mirroring the theme of continuity and sameness-as-devotion. The bridge-like middle section shifts from listing time to listing light and occasion (dawn, night, birthday candle), giving the piece its one moment of imagistic expansion before returning to the enumerating chorus. The final stanza recycles the seasonal language from the opening but shifts tense from future to retrospective, closing the loop.
Section by section
Opening verse
“north and south and east and west”
The question of a shared future is immediately spatialized, borrowing the language of geography and compass points to suggest a life measured in totality rather than in individual moments.
Second verse
The lyric moves from abstract time to its smallest denominations, treating days as literal currency to be spent. This shift toward the mundane and quantifiable keeps the sentiment from tipping into pure abstraction.
Bridge
“fields of dawn and forests of the night”
Here the song allows itself its most vivid imagery, expanding from clock-time to visual and emotional registers -- light, birthdays, secret wishes -- suggesting the desire is not just for duration but for intimate witness.
Final stanza
The seasonal language of the opening returns, but the grammatical frame flips from a future request to a retrospective claim, as though the proposal has already been granted and lived out; the song ends by collapsing the imagined future into remembered totality.
Craft
- anaphora
- Repeated phrase openings ('all the...') across parallel lines pile up categories of time and value, reinforcing the idea that no fraction of a life is being asked for -- all of it is.
- merism
- Pairing opposites like north/south, east/west, or summer/winter stands in for the whole of experience by naming its extremes, a common device for expressing totality.
- extended metaphor
- Time itself becomes a kind of currency and terrain -- spent, measured, walked through in different lights -- letting the song talk about mortality without naming it.
Reading it
Read straightforwardly, this is an unusually literal proposal song -- most of its work is done by exhaustive enumeration (every season, every light, every day) rather than metaphor for its own sake, which gives the sentiment a kind of accountant's sincerity. A secondary reading, encouraged by the closing shift into retrospection, hears the song as being sung from the vantage of an already-completed life, so the 'question' is really an act of memory, softening the piece from a proposal into an elegy for a life well spent together. Both readings coexist without contradiction; the ambiguity of tense is likely intentional.
Context
The song was written by Michel Legrand with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, originally for the 1969 film The Happy Ending, and became a standard covered widely in the jazz and pop repertoire through the 1970s. McRae's version appears on a live recording of Great American Songbook standards; her reputation for ironic, behind-the-beat delivery suggests she likely resists the song's more saccharine tendencies, though I have not heard this specific performance and cannot describe her phrasing choices with certainty.
Listen for
- how McRae's phrasing sits behind or ahead of the beat, especially on the repeated 'all the' lines
- whether she varies dynamics between the enumerating verses and the more image-driven bridge
- any spoken or conversational inflection that undercuts the song's sentimentality
- the tense shift in the final stanza and whether her delivery marks it as a turn
About Carmen McRae
Carmen Mercedes McRae was an American jazz singer. She is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century and is remembered for her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretation of lyrics.
1920 - 1994 / United States
Full biography and catalogue