Harry Nilsson / A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night / 1973
What'll I Do
wistful, resigned melancholy
This is Nilsson's reading of Irving Berlin's 1924 standard, delivered as part of his second collection of pre-rock pop songs. Stripped of any rock-era irony, it's a straightforward torch song about the aftermath of a breakup, sung by a narrator who has nothing left but memory and a photograph.
heartbreak loneliness memory and photographs romantic fatalism the standards tradition
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an absent former lover directly, oscillating between describing the breakup to them and voicing private despair to no one in particular; the voice is plaintive but not embittered, more stunned by loss than angry.
What happens
The song opens with a brief acknowledgment that the relationship is over and irreparable, then abandons narrative almost entirely in favor of a repeated, unanswerable question about how to survive the separation. There's no arc of recovery or resolution -- the song ends exactly where it began, still asking.
How it's built
A short recitative-like verse sets the scene of the breakup, then the song settles into a refrain built almost entirely on one repeated question, varied only by what triggers it (distance, jealousy, a photograph, empty dreams). The lack of a bridge or shift in perspective mirrors the speaker's inability to move past the moment; the repetition itself becomes the song's structural argument.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song dispatches the entire plot in a handful of lines: the romance is over, blame is diffused rather than assigned, and both parties are simply expected to separate. This brevity is deliberate -- it treats the breakup as an established fact rather than a scene to dwell on, clearing space for the refrain to become the real subject.
First refrain
“What'll I do when you are far away”
The central question is introduced without any expectation of an answer. Its plainness is the point -- there's no metaphor doing the work here, just direct, almost childlike helplessness.
Jealousy variation
The question shifts from absence to imagined infidelity, showing the speaker's mind working obsessively rather than healing. It's a small but telling escalation: distance alone wasn't the worst part, imagining the ex with someone else is worse.
Photograph passage
“just a photograph to tell my troubles to”
This is the song's most concrete image and its emotional low point. Confiding in a photograph underscores total isolation -- the speaker has been reduced to talking to an object because there's no one left to listen.
Closing repetition
Rather than building to a climax, the song simply loops back to its earlier language about dreams that won't be realized, then repeats the whole passage once more. The effect is circular and unresolved, suggesting the grief itself is looping, not progressing.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated question that opens nearly every line functions as both title and emotional engine, turning the song into a kind of incantation of helplessness rather than a story with progression.
- synecdoche
- The photograph stands in for the entire lost relationship, a single object carrying the weight of everything unspoken now that the person themselves is gone.
- apostrophe
- The speaker addresses the absent lover directly, which heightens the futility of the question -- there's no one there to actually answer it.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a fairly literal, unadorned lament -- Nilsson isn't reinventing or subverting the standard, he's inhabiting it, using his vocal control and phrasing to sell an old-fashioned sentiment without irony. A secondary reading, given Nilsson's own turbulent life and his interest by this period in classic pop as a kind of refuge, is that the song's plainness and lack of resolution mirror a broader inability (his, or a more general one) to process loss through anything but repetition -- the song doesn't resolve because grief, in this telling, doesn't either.
Context
"What'll I Do" is an Irving Berlin composition from 1923-24, long before Nilsson's version. By 1973, Nilsson had already made his reputation partly through interpreting other writers' songs, and this album continues the direction of his prior standards collection, favoring lush orchestration and a crooner's approach over the more idiosyncratic songwriting of his earlier rock-era work. I don't have reliable details on the specific recording session or arrangement choices for this track.
Listen for
- how the melody itself circles rather than climbs, reinforcing the lyric's repetition
- the contrast between the terse, almost clinical verse and the raw plainness of the refrain
- Nilsson's vocal restraint here compared to his more theatrical or comic performances elsewhere
- the way the photograph image lands as the song's one moment of physical detail
About Harry Nilsson
Harold "Harry" Edward Nilsson III, sometimes credited as Nilsson, was an American singer and songwriter known for his versatile tenor range, pioneering use of vocal overdubbing, explorations of the Great American Songbook, and Caribbean fusion sounds. He was one of the few major pop-rock artists to achieve significant commercial success without touring or performing large-scale public concerts.
1941 - 1994 / United States
Full biography and catalogue