The record in context

“Chances Are” was written by Robert Allen and Al Stillman — the same team behind “It’s Not for Me to Say” — and recorded by Johnny Mathis on June 16, 1957, in a session produced by Mitch Miller, with Ray Conniff’s orchestra. Released on August 12, 1957, with “The Twelfth of Never” as its B-side, it spent a week at No. 1 on Billboard’s Most Played by Jockeys chart, reached No. 5 on the Top 100, and topped the Cash Box best-seller list. It was Mathis’s first No. 1 single — and, for twenty-one years, his only one.

The song has since been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame (1998) and selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry. When Billboard commemorated the 60th anniversary of Mathis’s career in 2016, “Chances Are” topped their list of his ten biggest hits. It is, by every measure, his signature song.

Listen closely

The arrangement is a small marvel of 1950s pop craft. It opens with a gentle, almost music-box piano figure before the orchestra blooms around Mathis’s entrance — and what an entrance: “Chances are, ’cause I wear a silly grin.” He sings it with a smile you can hear, the sound of a young man who can’t quite believe his luck and isn’t trying to hide it.

Listen to the architecture of the vocal. The verses are conversational, nearly spoken in places; the chorus lifts without ever straining. Mathis’s great gift — the ability to make a big emotional statement at low volume — is on full display: the climactic “chances are” phrases are sung with complete control, the vibrato never widening into melodrama. Ray Conniff’s orchestra provides a plush cushion, but never competes; this is a singer’s record, and everyone in the studio knew it.

There’s a particular pleasure in hearing a signature song at the moment it becomes one. Mathis was twenty-one, in his first full year of stardom, and you can hear him discovering — in real time — the exact dimensions of his gift: the unhurried phrasing, the crystalline diction, the emotional directness without sentimentality. Every element of the Mathis style is present here, fully formed, in under three minutes.

And consider the B-side. “The Twelfth of Never” — the flip of this very single — would itself reach No. 9. It’s one of the great double-sided hits in pop history: buy the record for one song, fall in love with both. That almost never happens. In the summer of 1957, for Johnny Mathis, it did.