The Last Dance

The closing track on Sinatra’s 1959 album Come Dance with Me!, this elegiac ballad brings the dance to a bittersweet end — the last song of the evening, the last dance with someone you’re losing. Cahn’s lyric is achingly precise, the metaphor of the last dance carrying the full weight of romantic endings without ever becoming overwrought.

A perfect album closer, and a reminder that Cahn and Van Heusen understood not just how to write great songs but how to sequence them for maximum emotional impact.