Billie Holiday Songs For Distingue Lovers

Billie Holiday’s later albums are a bittersweet listen. On the one hand, the warmth and humor she used to transcend her suffering never sounded so natural. On the other, you can hear her voice deteriorating, the highs and lows scraped away by addiction and hard living. To conflate the roughness of 1957’s Songs for Distingué Lovers with authenticity would be to perpetuate the myth that artists need to bleed for their art. But no matter how many men abused her, or how routinely she was cheated out of money, Holiday never played the victim. Instead, she became a monument to her own resilience. Steered back toward a smaller band by producer and Verve label head Norman Granz, Songs for Distingué Lovers found her delving into the American songbook of the 1930s and 1940s: “A Foggy Day,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” etc. That all six songs here had been written during her career—and had all taken on rich second lives as jazz standards—was a quiet testament to Holiday’s longevity: She had lived to see them grow, change, and develop, and now she was taking her shot. No singer made pain seem so universal but so manageable, so inexorably part of the human experience—something that, with the right distance, you were almost grateful to feel. Astronomically speaking, a star is at its brightest just before it dies. Holiday would be gone within two years. Even in its fragility, Songs for Distingué Lovers shines.