The record in context

“It’s Not for Me to Say” was written by Robert Allen and Al Stillman — the team that would also give Mathis “Chances Are” — and recorded by Mathis on September 20, 1956. MGM signed him to perform it in the 1957 film Lizzie, starring Eleanor Parker as a woman with multiple personalities; Mathis appears in a small role as a piano singer, performing both sides of his next single. Released on February 25, 1957, the record reached No. 5 on the Billboard chart — his first Top 5 hit.

Nobody remembers Lizzie. But the song escaped its film completely, becoming a standard that Mathis would sing for the rest of his life — and turning up decades later in films as different as Goodfellas (1990) and Zodiac (2007). It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008. The lesson: a great song doesn’t need a great movie. Sometimes it just needs the right voice, once.

Listen closely

The lyric is a marvel of romantic restraint: the singer sees that this could be heaven, but refuses to presume — “it’s not for me to say.” Mathis’s delivery honors that hesitation completely. He never pushes the sentiment; he lets it hover. Listen to the opening verse: he sings almost conversationally, as if thinking aloud, and the orchestra stays hushed behind him, as if afraid to interrupt.

The technical display is in the long lines. Mathis sustains phrases that would leave most singers gasping, and he does it without any audible effort — the breath control that would become his trademark is already fully formed here. Notice the final “we will never meet again”: he sings the word “we” with a gentle swell that contains the whole song’s ache in a single syllable. It’s the kind of detail that separates a singer from a stylist.

There’s a reason this song worked in films for fifty years after Lizzie vanished. It creates a mood of suspended possibility — romance considered but not declared — that directors keep finding useful. Mathis’s recording is the definitive version precisely because he never resolves the tension. The song ends, but the question hangs in the air: is it heaven? He still won’t say. And you still can’t stop listening for the answer.

Play it after “Wonderful! Wonderful!” and you hear the leap: from a promising young singer to a complete artist, in a matter of months. The voice is the same; the authority is new.