The 1970s File Feature
It's Impossible
It's Impossible — Perry Como The Velvet Fog of the Mainstream At the dawn of the 1970s, when rock music was loudly declaring its cultural supremacy and AM ra…
01 The Story
It's Impossible — Perry Como
The Velvet Fog of the Mainstream
At the dawn of the 1970s, when rock music was loudly declaring its cultural supremacy and AM radio was beginning to fracture into competing demographics, Perry Como proved something important: a certain kind of classic, unhurried vocal elegance still had enormous commercial appeal. It's Impossible became one of the biggest hits of his career, a late-period triumph that confirmed Como's standing not as a relic from another era but as an artist with a genuinely timeless appeal. The record appeared at a moment when the mainstream pop audience was broader and more diverse than rock criticism's preferred narrative acknowledged, and Como knew that audience intimately.
By 1970, Perry Como had been a professional entertainer for over three decades. He had been a teenage barber in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, before music took over; he had sung with Ted Weems's orchestra in the late 1930s; he had built a postwar recording career of extraordinary consistency, producing major hits across the 1940s and 1950s. His television presence, through multiple long-running variety programs, had kept him visible to American families throughout the years when rock and roll was supposedly displacing his generation entirely. He was beloved in a way that transcended chart statistics.
A Song Born in Latin America
It's Impossible began its life as a Mexican song called Somos Novios, written by the celebrated composer Armando Manzanero. Manzanero was one of the most important figures in Latin American popular song, a pianist and vocalist from the Yucatan whose romantic compositions had been recorded by artists across Latin America and beyond. Somos Novios was one of his most enduring creations, a piece about the particular sweetness of new love, the way early romantic feeling fills the senses and makes the ordinary world luminous.
The English adaptation, with lyrics by Sid Wayne, transformed the song for North American audiences while preserving the melodic elegance of Manzanero's original. Wayne's English text matched the romantic sentiment of the Spanish original while using the kind of poetic imagery that Como could deliver with maximum conviction: the impossibility of describing the depth of a love that exceeds language.
An Extraordinary Chart Run
The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on November 14, 1970, at number 100, the most modest possible beginning. What followed was a climb of extraordinary patience and persistence. Through late November and December the record climbed steadily through the chart, passing through the 30s and 20s and into the top 15 as the new year arrived. The song peaked at number 10 on January 23, 1971, spending a remarkable 17 weeks on the Hot 100 in total. That run represented one of the most sustained chart performances of Como's career and placed him squarely in commercial territory that most of his contemporaries from the pre-rock era could not access.
The production surrounding Como's vocal was elegant and appropriately lush, with strings and orchestral support that created a frame worthy of the melody. At a moment when production values in pop were moving in multiple directions simultaneously, the choice to give It's Impossible a classic, unhurried setting served the material well and positioned it for the adult contemporary audience that would define the 1970s mainstream.
Grammy Recognition and Cultural Impact
The song earned Como a Grammy Award nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, confirming the critical establishment's recognition of what the public had already voted for with their record purchases. It also introduced Armando Manzanero's songwriting to a vast North American audience that might otherwise never have encountered his work, contributing to a broader appreciation of Latin American pop composition in the English-speaking world.
The cultural impact of the song extended well beyond its immediate chart life. It became a standard in Como's live repertoire, a touchstone in his concerts and television appearances for years afterward. Its combination of melodic beauty and lyrical directness made it the kind of song that listeners learned to associate with a particular feeling about romance and permanence rather than just a specific moment on the radio.
The Durability of Craft
What It's Impossible ultimately demonstrates is the staying power of craft over novelty. Perry Como did not chase the sounds of 1970; he sang with the technique and emotional intelligence he had developed over three decades, in service of a melody that required no contemporary reference points to communicate its meaning. The result was a record that belonged to its moment without being limited by it, one that sounded as compelling in 1975 or 1985 as it did on first release. Press play, let the strings enter, and understand why this man sold records for forty years.
"It's Impossible" — Perry Como's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
02 Song Meaning
It's Impossible — Themes and Meaning
The Paradox of Inexpressible Love
There is a long tradition in romantic poetry and song of treating love as something that exceeds the capacities of language. It's Impossible belongs squarely to that tradition, building its entire lyrical argument around the idea that the deepest romantic feelings cannot be adequately described or explained. The beloved's qualities, the depth of the attachment, the specific texture of the joy they bring: all of these resist the speaker's efforts to put them into words. This paradox, using language to argue for language's inadequacy, is one of the oldest and most emotionally resonant moves in the romantic songbook, and Perry Como's performance gives it new life.
The repeated declaration that something is "impossible" functions not as a counsel of despair but as a form of superlative. What is impossible to describe is not absent or unreal; it is too present, too real, too complete to be reduced to words. The song proposes that the limits of language are actually a measure of love's magnitude.
Armando Manzanero and the Latin Romantic Tradition
The song's origins in Somos Novios, Armando Manzanero's celebrated Mexican composition, connect it to a Latin American romantic tradition that had been developing its own sophisticated vocabulary for describing love across the twentieth century. Manzanero's melodic gift lay in his ability to create lines that felt simultaneously inevitable and surprising, melodies that the ear wanted to follow because each phrase resolved in a way that felt emotionally right. That melodic intelligence is fully present in It's Impossible, which is why the song works in both its Spanish and English incarnations and why it has been recorded by hundreds of artists across multiple languages and decades.
The translation of the song into English also represents a small cultural bridge, a moment when the vast and varied tradition of Latin American romantic song made contact with the North American mainstream in a form that preserved the original's emotional integrity.
The Adult Contemporary Moment
In 1970 and 1971, a segment of the American pop audience was actively seeking music that offered emotional warmth and melodic craft without the abrasiveness or political charge of rock and roll. This was not a failure of sophistication on their part; it was a genuine set of preferences that the market registered clearly. Adult contemporary music in this period was building an identity distinct from both the rock mainstream and the older easy listening tradition, and It's Impossible was exactly the kind of record that audience wanted: impeccably performed, emotionally direct, and built around a melody strong enough to stay in the memory after the record ended.
Perry Como understood this audience not through demographic calculation but through genuine affinity. He had always made music of this kind because it reflected his own sensibility, and the audience recognized that authenticity in his performances.
Simplicity as a Form of Depth
One of the things that gives It's Impossible its lasting resonance is the simplicity of its emotional proposition. It does not attempt psychological complexity or narrative ambiguity. It says, with complete conviction, that some loves are too large and too true to be fully expressed. That simplicity is not a limitation; it is a commitment to the emotional clarity that the best romantic songs achieve. Listeners in their seventies who first heard this record when it topped the adult contemporary charts still remember exactly what it felt like to hear it, because the feeling it describes is one of the most universal in human experience, and Como delivered it without a wasted syllable or a misplaced note.
"It's Impossible" — Perry Como's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
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