I’ll Never Be the Same is a 1932 jazz ballad built on the instrumental “Little Buttercup” by Matty Malneck and Frank Signorelli, with lyrics by Gus Kahn. It was introduced in 1932 by Mildred Bailey with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, and the same year Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians also charted with it. The song has become a enduring jazz standard, ranked around 210 on JazzStandards.com’s list of the 1000 most-recorded jazz tunes. A notable vocal version by Frank Sinatra appears on the 1955 album In the Wee Small Hours. Other famous interpretations include Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong with Oscar Peterson, Artie Shaw, Coleman Hawkins, and Diana Krall in 2004. The tune is known for its melancholic lyric about lost love, set in Eb with a hopeful move from a relative minor to a relative major.
