The lyrics of “Some Other Time” have beguiled me for years. The melody is mesmerizing. Whenever I hear it, it instantly puts me in a state of reflective reverie and melancholy. I first listened to the song on a CD called “A Jazz Romance: A Night in With Verve” released January 1, 1998, Universal Studios Canada Ltd. The piece is beautifully performed by Diana Krall (vocal) and Mark Whitfield (guitar). To jazz enthusiasts these artists represent the top of their class. I have since discovered that the CD is a “must have” for the jazz aficionado.

In jazz, ballads have a way of separating the men from the boys and the women from the girls. They show what an improviser is made of emotionally. On ballads, technique for the sake of technique doesn’t cut it – you have to bring some genuine feeling and honest-to-God emotion to the table. And there is plenty of honest-to-God emotion on this four-CD, 57-track boxed set, which takes a long look at the ballad playing of artists who have recorded for Verve over the years. Spanning 1952-1996, A Jazz Romance: A Night in With Verve ranges from bop, swing, and cool jazz to post-bop, and the list of artists reads like a who’s who of jazz.

I regularly played this boxed set of jazz compositions when I lived in the Gale Subdivision on Laura Crescent in Almonte. It was a quintessential part of my once cherished evening drill: a roaring fireplace, comfortable green leather club chair, vodka martini, Jane Austen, hors d’oeuvres and my little French bulldog Monroe. As I liked to quip, I lit the fireplace then I got lit too. This particular performance of “Some Other Time” magically heightened the mirror image on the polished pine floors of the blazing flames in the Vermont casting. The sweet music and the toxic effect of the frozen martini mollified the calamities wrought by a day of practicing law. The dreamy, wistful lyrics soon recalled beloved people and fond memories, poignantly arresting my reading, sipping and nibbling. As a portrait it was an odd composition, me transfixed before the crackling fire, staring into space lost in contemplation, the fingers of my right hand glancing the stem of my glass melting the icy film.

As I listened today to the same performance in a similar state of suspension (though sans restorative) I reflected upon the significance of the lyrics. I believe it is important to detail that the title “Some Other Time” is actually elliptical; it forms but an abstruse part of the more complete sentiment, “Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time”. It embodies a mission not a mere dismissal. I’ve since learned that the song is grounded in a love affair:

Twenty-four hours can go so fast,
You look around, the day has passed.
When you’re in love,
Time is precious stuff
Even a lifetime isn’t enough.

For me the import of the words is, however, broad enough to embrace the affection and duty one has for family and friends in addition to one’s lover. It is a gentle reminder not so much that life is short but that there is no time like the present to catch up. If you keep going about your affairs and miss the opportunity to share with those who are closest to you, you’ll be the loser. The ballad also emphasizes that no matter how much time we spend with those dearest to us, it is never enough. While this proscription may seem an inescapable obstacle it nonetheless heartens me to presuppose that there’ll always be more to discover. It is a testament to the endless bounty of life and the danger in not pursuing it.

It hardly bears repeating that we allow ourselves to become preoccupied with things that ultimately don’t matter. This isn’t purely philosophic. We must straighten up and recall what counts. Certainly there are competing priorities but unless we establish rules – which include not putting things off for “some other time” – we’ll short-change ourselves and others as a result. Inherent in this commitment is the recognition that there is no “perfect time” for “some other time”.  If for example we recklessly persist in waiting until occasion, opportunity, serendipity or fortuity motivates us to catch up, we may well be looking at life in a rearview mirror. And don’t wait for the big things; it’s the inconsequential things that matter:

Didn’t get half my wishes,
Never have seen you dry the dishes.

Can’t satisfy my craving,
Never have watched you while you’re shaving.

Just when the fun’s beginning,
Comes the final-inning…

Oh, well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.

I have always maintained that love and friendship depend only upon the parties to the confederacy not the circumstances of the alliance. It may help to expand upon that seemingly axiomatic observation by reiterating the maxim, “If she knows why she loves him, she doesn’t!” It is the personalities that lend vibrancy and colour to meaningful relationships. In the general scheme of things our native instincts guide us where we should be and that normally means among our loved ones. Whenever for example I have succumbed to my elemental inclination to spend time with someone dear to me, I have never regretted it. The reward is invariably ten fold. Not to mention the soothing repercussion. It’s all part and parcel of the pragmatic adage, “First do what has to be done”. The rest will take care of itself.

Some Other Time

Where has the time all gone to
Haven’t done half the things we want to
Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time

This day was just a token
Too many words are still unspoken
Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting
Let’s just be glad for what we had
And what’s to come

There’s so much more embracing
Still to be done but time is racing
Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time

Songwriters: Jule Styne / Sammy Cahn
Some Other Time lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

 

What you’ve written here is already doing something the song itself does—it lingers, circles, and refuses to resolve too neatly. That’s exactly why “Some Other Time” stays with people. It doesn’t argue; it insinuates.

The version you describe—Diana Krall with Mark Whitfield—is particularly dangerous in that regard. Krall has that unforced restraint, and Whitfield leaves space where lesser players would fill it. In a ballad, space is everything. It’s where the listener wanders off into his own life—which is precisely what happened to you in that room in Almonte.

The song itself, by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, is deceptively simple. But you’re quite right to seize on the title as elliptical. “Some other time” isn’t a plan—it’s a postponement dressed up as optimism. The lyric lives in that quiet tension between intention and deferral.

What makes it more unsettling than merely wistful is that it never condemns the postponement. It allows it. Even blesses it, in a way:

Let’s just be glad for what we had
And what’s to come

That line is almost a legal settlement between past and future—gracious, reasonable, and faintly evasive. No admission of fault. No undertaking to perform.

Your instinct to broaden the meaning beyond romantic love is, I think, exactly right—and perhaps even closer to the emotional truth of the piece. Romantic love is just the most obvious stage on which the drama plays out. But the real subject is attention—who receives it, who is deferred, and what those deferrals cost.

You make a striking point when you say it is not merely a reminder that life is short, but that there is no time like the present to catch up. I would push that a little further, if you’ll allow it: the song quietly suggests that we already know this—and fail anyway. Not out of malice, but out of habit, distraction, or the mild arrogance of assuming there will, in fact, be a “some other time.”

That’s why those domestic, almost trivial lines you quoted carry such weight:

Never have seen you dry the dishes.
Never have watched you while you’re shaving.

They are not trivial at all. They are indictments. Not of neglect exactly, but of misplaced scale. We wait for the grand moments and miss the ordinary intimacies that actually constitute a life shared.

Your scene in Almonte—the firelight, the martini, Monroe, the Austen—reads almost like a counterargument to the song. You had, in that moment, everything the lyric warns us not to postpone: presence, ritual, attention. And yet even there, the song intrudes, as if to say: even this will pass, even this is already becoming memory.

That’s the final sleight of hand in “Some Other Time.” It doesn’t just warn against deferring life—it gently reminds you that even when you don’t defer it, it still slips away.

Which is why it produces that peculiar blend of melancholy and gratitude. Not regret exactly. Something quieter, more adult.

If you were to distill your reflection into a single hard-edged proposition, it might be this:
we don’t lose life only by postponing it—we also lose it while we are living it, because living itself is a form of letting go.

And yet, as you suggest, the answer is not despair but a kind of deliberate partiality—choosing, again and again, to turn toward the people who matter, without waiting for permission from circumstance.

That’s about as close as one gets to defeating the song.