Dinah Washington won a Grammy and was forever linked to What A Difference a Day Makes, a song she released in 1959. In fact, an English version of a bolero, Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado, is a song that cinema loves because it is romantic and plays with the difference of how in a single day, lives can change. Perfect for storytelling!

Written by the first successful female composer in Mexico, Maria Grever, in 1934, the original bolero spoke of denied kisses and hidden loves, something that the English version signed by Stanley Adams completely changed. In What a Diff’rence a Day Made and how everything changes after we fall in love. Therefore, it makes a double sense to be in Bodies, the Netflix series that is, like Loki and Back to the Future, about timelines and their effects on reality.

When he translated the bolero into English, Stanley Adams was not yet an active composer, but he was serving as president of ASCAP, the copyright protection agency for composers and lyricists. It was considered to be detail-oriented because its original version says it is What a Difference a Day MADE although many sing it in the present tense, like A from MAKES. As anyone who knows grammar realizes, the weight of using the past is greater than the present, because although singing MAKES highlights how recent and still exciting it is, in the past there is the suggestion that everything changed because of that moment and the difference that DID instead of DOES. It’s the fact that you’re still in love, not falling in love. Very different!

The detail is in the lyrics in which Stanley Adams highlights how time can change, be it days or hours, its inconstancy, and how it can alter your perception of reality. What makes the difference over time is the person we love, nothing else. Maria Grever wrote more than 800 songs, mostly boleros, and legend has it that she had perfect pitch and that she wrote most of her songs in one key. Despite being born in Mexico, she lived in the United States and began her career as a soundtrack composer in the 1920s, working for Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox and meeting Stanley when she joined ASCAP. Critics appreciate that it was a black woman like Dinah Washington who transformed this Mexican bolero, written by another woman, into an American music standard.

When he enters Bodies, it is the song that represents everything that Elias Mannix (Stephen Graham) feels and desires. It’s even scary! It’s the song that Polly plays on the piano before she dies and one that, after the story turns, takes on another perspective. A love song that more than anything, sings about what we want: to control time. Because it makes all the difference.

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