A steadfast promise echoing through years — “Throughout All Time” keeps love’s image alive even after goodbye
First things first: “Throughout All Time” is an album cut by Dwight Yoakam from his 1987 studio album Hillbilly Deluxe, released July 7, 1987. The album itself was a commercial triumph—No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums in the U.S., while peaking at No. 51 in the U.K.—but “Throughout All Time” was not issued as an A-side single, so it carried no individual chart placement. It did, however, serve as the B-side to the Top 10 country single “Please, Please Baby.”
On the record, “Throughout All Time” arrives like a bright neon sign hung over a midnight street—up-tempo, almost jaunty, yet written with the ache of someone who knows how loss keeps walking beside you. Hillbilly Deluxe—cut with producer-guitarist Pete Anderson—was Yoakam’s second consecutive country-albums chart-topper, a lean, Bakersfield-kissed set where Telecasters sting and the rhythm section snaps like a well-worn lariat. Nestled among the singles (“Little Ways,” “Please, Please Baby,” “Little Sister,” and later “Always Late with Your Kisses”), this song holds its own as a small, persistent light inside the album’s ten tracks.
Listen closely and you can feel the lyric’s quiet vow. The narrator keeps seeing that one face “walking… through the shadows” of his mind—a flicker that refuses to fade, not today, not tomorrow, “throughout all time.” The words are simple, but they carry the weight of long roads and longer nights. Yoakam writes with plainspoken tenderness, the kind that doesn’t crush your chest so much as it fills it with a slow, familiar thrum. (You can find the track exactly where it belongs—track 8 on the original album—clocking in at about 3:54.)
What makes “Throughout All Time” linger is the way the band plays against the sorrow. There’s a lift in the tempo, a forward lean in the guitars, as if the music insists on carrying the heart onward even while memory looks back. That contrast—foot on the gas, eyes in the rear-view—is pure Yoakam. It’s the Bakersfield inheritance he revived in the eighties: hard twang for soft wounds, bright tones shading darker truths. On Hillbilly Deluxe, that design repeats: even the liveliest tunes often hide a bruise, and this one wears it with unassuming grace.
For those who came of age with Dwight Yoakam, the song feels like a letter folded and refolded in a coat pocket. You can almost picture the roadside diners and two-lane dawns, the steady whirr of tires on California blacktop, the way a name spoken only in memory still rings out like a church bell across the years. The vocal is clipped, clear, never showy; he lets the melody do the consoling while the lyric keeps its promise—quiet as a prayer muttered under breath.
There’s also a lovely bit of history tucked into its release: when “Please, Please Baby” hit radio in late 1987, “Throughout All Time” rode along as its B-side, the kind of pairing that made sense in the vinyl era—an A-side built for the charts, a B-side that caught the heart on its own terms. That’s how many of us first turned the record over, expecting a throwaway and finding instead a companion for long drives and longer memories.
If you put the album on today, “Throughout All Time” still feels like warm light spilling through a cracked door. It does not plead; it simply endures. The chorus circles back the way thoughts do when the house quiets, when the coffee cools, when the day’s noise finally lets the past speak. And though time goes on—as relentless as a highway—it leaves room for a song like this to keep watch over what we loved and could not keep.
That may be the secret of “Throughout All Time”: it turns remembrance into rhythm. The beat keeps moving; the image stays. And somewhere between the two—between the neon and the night—Dwight Yoakam finds a way to tell us that some affections don’t vanish; they simply learn to walk beside us, mile after mile, album after album, throughout all time.