Every Time We Say Goodbye

Cole Porter wrote this at the end of his relationship with a man, and the knowledge of that context makes Krall's reading feel even more weighted. She approaches it with complete seriousness — no jazz embellishment that might soften the emotional directness, the piano spare and hymn-like in places, the rhythm section reduced almost to suggestion. Her voice is at its most technically controlled and emotionally transparent simultaneously: the long descending phrases handled with impeccable breath and absolute sadness. The lyric's central irony — finding beauty in what's already lost — lands completely. This is a ballad that earns the word. The arrangement creates the sense of an ending drawn out past its natural point, as if the music itself doesn't want the moment to close. You bring this out for grief, for endings of all kinds, for those occasions when sentimentality would be dishonest and you need music that measures up to actual feeling.