- As Time Goes By
- The Way You Look Tonight
- Easy Living
- I'm In The Mood For Love
- Where Or When
- When Somebody Thinks You're Wonderful
- Sweet And Lovely
- Miss Otis Regrets
- Time On My Hands
- Lover Come Back To Me
- Falling In Love Again
- Love Me Or Leave Me
- You Do Something To Me
- Just One Of Those Things
- September Song
Velvet Nostalgia
When Bryan Ferry released As Time Goes By in 1999, it felt less like a career move and more like an act of elegant time travel. The former Roxy Music frontman - long a connoisseur of glamour, artifice, and longing - turned his gaze backward, to the smoky cabarets and dance halls of the 1930s. The result is an album that seems to hover outside of time itself: not a nostalgic pastiche, but a meticulously crafted reverie. Ferry doesn’t so much cover these standards as he inhabits them, reshaping the ghosts of the past into something intimate, cinematic, and deeply personal.
In lesser hands, such a collection might have been an exercise in retro chic. But Ferry’s relationship to style has always been spiritual, not superficial. His croon - at once fragile and assured - moves through these songs with an exquisite sense of restraint, as though he’s whispering secrets to the listener from across the decades. The arrangements, bathed in warmth and subtle orchestration, evoke a world of candlelight, soft brass, and twilight melancholy. Every texture feels touched by care and reverence, yet there’s a knowing irony beneath the silk: Ferry is both participant and observer, the lover and the archivist.
As Time Goes By functions as both homage and self-portrait. The album reveals how deeply the DNA of these pre-war songs runs through Ferry’s own aesthetic - the melancholy glamour, the obsession with elegance, the romance of imperfection. Beneath the tuxedo sheen lies an artist wrestling with transience: how beauty fades, how desire lingers, how memory outlasts both. Listening to it, one senses that Ferry isn’t trying to relive the past so much as to preserve its emotional truth before it slips away entirely.
This is not an album that demands attention; it invites quiet surrender. Its pleasures are in nuance - the tremor of a phrase, the brush of a snare, the glow of a muted trumpet at midnight. In an age of noise and immediacy, As Time Goes By dares to be patient, graceful, and timelessly human.
In lesser hands, such a collection might have been an exercise in retro chic. But Ferry’s relationship to style has always been spiritual, not superficial. His croon - at once fragile and assured - moves through these songs with an exquisite sense of restraint, as though he’s whispering secrets to the listener from across the decades. The arrangements, bathed in warmth and subtle orchestration, evoke a world of candlelight, soft brass, and twilight melancholy. Every texture feels touched by care and reverence, yet there’s a knowing irony beneath the silk: Ferry is both participant and observer, the lover and the archivist.
As Time Goes By functions as both homage and self-portrait. The album reveals how deeply the DNA of these pre-war songs runs through Ferry’s own aesthetic - the melancholy glamour, the obsession with elegance, the romance of imperfection. Beneath the tuxedo sheen lies an artist wrestling with transience: how beauty fades, how desire lingers, how memory outlasts both. Listening to it, one senses that Ferry isn’t trying to relive the past so much as to preserve its emotional truth before it slips away entirely.
This is not an album that demands attention; it invites quiet surrender. Its pleasures are in nuance - the tremor of a phrase, the brush of a snare, the glow of a muted trumpet at midnight. In an age of noise and immediacy, As Time Goes By dares to be patient, graceful, and timelessly human.
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My personal view:
Fifteen jazz standards, in an instrumentation representative for café-dansants of the thirties, sung by one of the best crooners in the pop/rock business. It could have been an absolute snore fest, it actually is one of my all-time favourite albums (just under top ten). As one critic put it: "the results are both predictable and thrilling, musically tasteful but as emotionally raw as good manners will allow." All songs are great, but some are even greater than others, such as As Time Goes By, Easy Living, Miss Otis Regrets, September Song, You Do Something To Me, and especially the gorgeous I'm In The Mood For Love and Where Or When (two of my all-time favourite songs). An exquisite album.