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From album
Lady in Satin
Billie Holiday · 1958 · Track 11
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The story behind
This song sounds like a whisper lingering in time, as if Billie Holiday —or Lady Day, as she was known— were singing from the other side of a fogged-up glass. It's not just the voice, but how the lyrics intertwine with the rhythm, as if each word were a step on a path with no return. The track I’ll Be Around isn’t a pledge of loyalty, but a promise dissolving in the air, with a cadence that seems to drift between jazz and blues, as if time itself had become flexible. There’s no rush in the performance, yet there’s no room for doubt: what it says sounds like truth, even if that truth hurts.
Recorded in 1958 for the album Lady in Satin, this song was one of the last Billie Billie recorded in her lifetime. The album, produced by Irving Townsend and with sound engineering by Fred Plaut, hit the shelves in both mono and stereo formats, something uncommon at the time. By then, Billie had already spent years under the wing of Norman Granz, the producer who had rescued her from exhausting tours and reunited her with old companions from the 1930s, such as Teddy Wilson. But there’s no cheap nostalgia here: the sound is dense, as if Billie’s voice had to carve its way through layers of accumulated melancholy. It lasts just over three minutes, yet in that time, decades of life fit.