Tracks: You Make Me Feel So Young//It Happened in Monterey//You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me//You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me//Too Marvelous For Words//Old Devil Moon//Pennies from Heaven//Love is Here to Stay//I've Got You Under My Skin//I Thought About You//We'll Be Together Again//Makin' Whoopee//Swingin' Down the Lane//Anything Goes//How About You?
It’s something of a cliché, but tough guys do tend to be sentimental buggers. I suppose Sinatra epitomises this – he cast himself as something of a stand-offish loner, and as a consequence most of his songs were about broken hearts. It’s a perfect marketing move, of course. What’s more likely to appeal to the chicks than a rebel with a heart of gold?
And Sinatra certainly appealed to the chicks. Back in the 40s he was on top of his game as one of the first honest to goodness teen pop idols. Girls went wild for him! It was really rather unprecedented, and it made his name, but at the same time any career built around youth and sex appeal has a rather limited lifespan. So, as the Fifties loomed and Sinatra got older, his popularity began to wain. He left the stage in ’48, and returned in 1950 only to suffer a devastating haemorrhaging of the throat while performing live at the Copacabana. By 1952, his career was in tatters and Columbia had dropped him. It looked like the end.
Of course, it wasn’t. In 1955 Sinatra (“allegedly”) used his Mob connections to get the career-saving role in From Here to Eternity. He won an Oscar, he got onboard with Capitol, and he went back to being a superstar, recording some of the best albums of his career or anybody’s. Sensibly, however, he chose to revamp his persona, aiming at a more mature market with albums alternating between dark, introspective balladeering (see: In the Wee Small Hours; also the excellent Where Are You?, which shakes things up due to the switch to arranger Gordon Jenkins, who offers a slightly peppier and considerably lusher, more orchestral take on the ballad format), and up-beat swing albums like this.
Following In the Wee Small Hours with Songs for Swingin’ Lovers must constitute one of the most powerful one-two punches in the history of pop. The familiarity of both the material on this album and the innovative methods of arrangement that Riddle applied mean that some of the shine has worn-off, but you can’t really argue with the slinky woodwinds opening “I Thought About You”, or the steady build of “Anything Goes” from a slightly flaccid start as strings and horns pile up on one another into a single, monumental groove. This is actually an example of one of the most impressive aspects of this album. Everything grooves just fine, anchored by a strong rhythm section, but nothing about the beat is restrictive. Violins and horns swirl around each other and then descend on the drums for a particularly swinging section. Frank’s voice floats above it all with quiet assuredness. He manages to tighten the somewhat formless opening of “It Happened at Monterey” into something wonderful and sweeping by its end.
Managing to loosen-up and expand the sound of so many classic pop numbers, most of which were written originally for little more than a piano or a small jazz combo, is quite astonishing. And the jazz element is very strong here, despite this being a pop album dominated by strings. “We’ll Be Together Again” is a relatively subdued ballad, closing out on some brief, beautiful saxophone soloing, for example. And what can you say about “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”? The most famous recording here, it’s lighter than air at first, and then blooms into a big, brassy instrumental passage and some high, airy crooning from Frank. His phrasing is astonishing. He fits perfectly into the delicately constructed groove of the song, riding the changes effortlessly and never once overextending himself. His phrasing on the opening of “I Thought About You” kills me, and the refrain on “Swinging Down the Lane” is wonderfully infectious.
This is a difficult album to say anything new about. All the songs are at worst quite solid. The only real complaints I could make are that it’s perhaps a little lacking in variety (strings back everything, the same ensemble, it's all played recorded live in studio so there's no change in production), and consequently sounds overlong. This wouldn’t have been much a problem if I had to get up and change the sides over halfway through a party, but listening to it through on headphones the problem becomes apparent.
This is nitpicking, though. Apparently Sinatra once said about one of these Capitol records that the general idea was to put side one on at dinner with a partner, and by the end of side two you’d be right where you wanted to be. Given that this closes-out on “Anything Goes” and “How About You?”, that seems fair. Most of the songs are top-notch choices, but a few of them are just cheap sentiment. Sinatra transcends all this to create one hell of an aphrodisiac. There’s none of the gut-wrenching emotion of the In the Wee Small Hours, but would you really want to listen to anything that can be described as “gut-wrenching” during a nice evening alone in bed with your lover? Sinatra’s voice and Riddle’s truly beautiful music combine to systematically seduce the listener with wistful, silly little songs of loving. This is one of the other clear advantages of the 12” that Sinatra’s seized at – you can’t really make-out for any length of time to a 45, can you? Every aspect of anxiety and longing is covered in this collection, all enough to soothe anxious nerves and get you in the mood. One particular recurring lyrical theme is the idea of missing a great chance – it’s kind of coercive, maybe, but it works.
Of course, if there’s one complaint it’s the same that can be levelled at In the Wee Small Hours – even more so, actually. Namely, the music is quite stirring but it doesn’t always exactly demand attention. To Sinatra and Riddle’s credit, however, there is no filler. This is great stuff. The level of compositional complexity and excellence is something I really miss about a lot of older pop music. And it was innovative, too! Name a crooner who doesn't owe something to this? This sort of stuff has been around for so long that it’s very easy to forget that it was once new.
So, yeah, this is a pretty good album, though maybe not quite his best, if only because history has blunted its impact through overplaying and rip-offs.
8/10
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