Chances Are

Johnny Mathis recorded "Chances Are" in 1957 and somehow deposited it permanently into the emotional sediment of American romantic longing. The arrangement is almost impossibly delicate — strings that hover rather than swell, a brush-and-snare rhythm section that barely registers as percussion, space left deliberately open so that Mathis's voice can exist in a kind of sonic suspension. That voice is the whole story. He sings in a light lyric tenor that sits unusually high for a male pop singer of that era, with a vibrato so natural and unhurried it sounds less like technique and more like the physical expression of uncertainty. The lyric is essentially about the courage it takes to read someone's feelings for you — the tentative hope of interpreting a glance or a touch as mutual affection — and Mathis doesn't perform this vulnerability so much as inhabit it completely. There's nothing theatrical here. The mood is intimate in the way a private thought is intimate, as if you've accidentally overheard someone confessing something they weren't ready to say aloud. This is pre-rock-and-roll American pop at its most interior, shaped by a Hollywood sensibility that understood romance as a form of beautiful uncertainty. You reach for it in late evening, alone or nearly alone, when you're not quite sure whether something between you and another person is real yet, and the not-knowing feels more sweet than frightening.