Time After Time

Written for the 1947 film It Happened in Brooklyn, this quietly devastating love song became one of the most recorded ballads of the postwar era. Sinatra’s original recording is definitive — his phrasing so perfectly matched to Cahn’s lyric that the two seem inseparable — but the song’s jazz credentials are equally strong, with Dinah Washington finding an entirely different emotional register in the same words.

The Isley Brothers’ 1962 R&B recording is a reminder of how far Cahn’s reach extended — a Tin Pan Alley lyric that crossed every genre boundary because the feeling it describes is simply that universal.