That Long, Long Time: The Enduring Promise of an Unending Love
The song’s meaning is a solemn, poetic vow of eternal, unconditional devotion to a beloved.
There are certain melodies, certain arrangements, that are instantly recognizable—not just for the notes they play, but for the precise moment in our lives they take us back to. And for a generation that was swept up in the shimmering, clean-cut world of teen idols in the early 1970s, few songs are as powerfully evocative as Donny Osmond’s tender and beautifully orchestrated rendition of “The Twelfth of Never.”
Released in the spring of 1973, this single was a pivotal moment in the solo career of the young man from Utah. His take on the classic ballad shot up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, cementing his status as a global phenomenon. In the United Kingdom, it reached the coveted Number 1 spot on the Official Singles Chart, reigning for one week in March 1973. Meanwhile, in the United States, it peaked at an impressive Number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and climbed to Number 7 on the Adult Contemporary chart. This success proved that Osmond could transition from the group dynamic of The Osmonds to a solo career built on sweet, sincere romance. The song was a cornerstone of his third solo album, Alone Together, a title that perhaps perfectly encapsulated the simultaneous sense of lonely devotion and universal connection he offered his legion of fans.
The Donny Osmond version, produced by Mike Curb and Don Costa, took a song already established in the Great American Songbook and draped it in the lush, sentimental production style of the era. The song itself was penned by the celebrated songwriting duo of Jerry Livingston and Paul Francis Webster in 1956, and its definitive original recording belonged to the great balladeer Johnny Mathis in 1957. But while Mathis’s version was smooth and classical, Donny’s was imbued with the earnest, yearning vocal quality of a teenage heartthrob.
At its core, “The Twelfth of Never” is a poetic masterpiece built around a single, powerful idiom: “the twelfth of never,” a timeless expression for a date that will quite simply never arrive. The lyrics brilliantly use a series of impossibilities—bluebells forgetting to bloom, clover losing its perfume, poets running out of rhyme—to illustrate the condition under which the singer will stop loving his darling. Since those impossibilities can never come to pass, the promise is one of endless, unwavering love.
It’s this simple, grand sweep of eternal devotion that resonated so deeply with those coming of age in the early seventies. For the young women—and men—who listened, it was the sound of the ideal romantic pledge, delivered with an innocence and sincerity that felt increasingly rare in a world becoming more cynical. It’s a song that speaks to a nostalgic yearning for the absolute, for a love unmarred by compromise or expiration dates. When you hear the strings swell as Donny Osmond hits that final, soaring ‘long, long time,’ it’s not just a melody you’re recalling; it’s the memory of a simpler time, a first crush, or the optimistic hope for a love that lasts until “the twelfth of never.” It remains a gentle, glowing ember of the 70s teen-pop era, a timeless testament to the power of a heartfelt promise.