Frank Sinatra – 10 of the best from the Capitol years

1. I Get a Kick Out of You

Frank Sinatra had been the biggest musical star of the 1940s, but the early 50s were very different. He could no longer fill the concert halls that had crowds of screaming bobbysoxers outside a few years earlier; his publicist and confidant, George Evans, had died in 1950; his public reputation was being shredded by the disintegration of his marriage to Nancy as he made it his mission to woo Ava Gardner. By 1952, shortly before Columbia Records dropped him, he was reduced to recording material that barely qualified as second-rate – though Bim Bam Baby sounds like the work of Cole Porter compared to the previous year’s Mama Will Bark. Then, in 1953, two events changed the course of his career. In March, he signed to Capitol Records, signalling the start of a new phase in his recording life, and in August, the film From Here to Eternity was released, with Sinatra winning the best supporting Oscar for his role as Private Angelo Maggio. Capitol paired its new signing with the arranger and conductor Nelson Riddle, creating the working partnership that would define the Sinatra sound. During his stint with Capitol, he had other collaborators who drew great work from him – Axel Stordahl, Gordon Jenkins, Billy May – but it was the chemistry with Riddle that revived Sinatra as a musical force. Their first recordings came out as singles, followed in 1954 by Sinatra’s first Capitol album, Songs for Young Lovers, a mere eight songs on 10in vinyl. There were no novelty songs, and it had a unified sound – swinging, but not aggressively. Sinatra – now pushing 40 – had a touch of gravel in his voice he had not had during his first rush of fame, and there was a relaxed wisdom to his singing. The arrangement (by George Siravo; Riddle conducted) of Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You – a walking double bass line, little stabs of electric guitar, the sweep of strings – is an easy joy, and Sinatra sings like a dream. This version also featured the original lyric, which he would later drop – “Some they may go for cocaine / I’m sure that even one sniff / It would bore me terifffffffffff / ically too.” But this is not a louche song; it’s a love song. And no one was more convincing at sounding happy and in love than Sinatra.

2. All of Me

Songs for Young Lovers was followed just seven months later by Swing Easy!, with Riddle overseeing the arrangements again. You can hear the difference: Riddle was masterly at creating a gentle setting, then ramping it up with brass. All of Me – one of the greatest standards of all, recorded by anyone who ever fancied themselves a singer of the great songs – begins with Sinatra floating on top of bass, piano, brushed drums and what sounds like a glockenspiel. Muted horns come in, then Sinatra’s voice soars as the horns kick in for good, a minute in. Across the Capitol recordings Sinatra would play with vocal techniques – the careful formality of the recordings of his younger years was set aside – and, especially on up-tempo numbers, he sounded like it was barely any effort at all. He took to gliding between notes – exactly what your school music teacher told you not to do – letting his voice swoop or rise, rather than making a clean leap. And on a song like All of Me, about obsessive love (if you read it literally, it’s a song about someone willing to be dismembered, since with their heart already gone, what point is there in keeping the rest of their body?), those vocal glissandi sound especially apt: the sound of your heart falling to the pit of your stomach and back.

3. Glad to Be Unhappy

Sinatra’s giant leap came in April 1955, with the release of In the Wee Small Hours. It was his first record released as 12in LP, and among the early examples of the kind made by anyone. One might have expected Sinatra, given this new trainset to play with, to have shown off the flashiest aspect of his work, going heavy on the swing, with bright shiny brass. Instead, he went in the exact opposite direction. The extended running time of the new format enabled Sinatra to create a lengthy mood piece – 16 tracks, all sharing a sombre, desolate mood (Tom Waits has called it “the very first concept album”). That he chose this path is usually attributed to the splintering of his relationship with Ava Gardner. Riddle said: “It was Ava who did that – who taught him how to sing a torch song. That’s how he learned. She was the greatest love of his life, and he lost her.” The writer Michael Nelson has suggested Sinatra was also unusually attuned to the rhythms of loneliness, having been a rare only child in Hoboken, New Jersey, rarer still among Italian-American families. Glad to Be Unhappy, a Rodgers and Hart number from the 1936 musical On Your Toes, showcases one of Sinatra’s great gifts: his ability to sound as if he is having conversation with the listener. For the two verses that introduce the song, you only realise he’s singing when you actually trace the notes, but you would swear he had been talking to you. And for someone whose image these days is based around the worst of him – the swaggering bore of the Rat Pack – he conveys vulnerability perfectly, helped by an often-noted weakness around middle C that meant ballads, especially, were given an appealing note of uncertainty. Or, as Sinatra himself put it: “Being an 18-carat manic depressive, and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an acute capacity for sadness.”

4. I Get Along Without You Very Well

Hoagy Carmichael’s 1939 ballad, based on a poem by Jane Brown Thompson, is perhaps the most heartbroken of all heartbreak ballads, because it involves the narrator desperately trying to convince himself he’s not heartbroken, a trick used time and time again. He gets along without her very well – of course he does. Except “when the soft rains fall and drip from leaves, then I recall the thrill of being sheltered in your arms”. And “except perhaps in spring, but I should never think of spring, for that would surely break my heart in two”. Sinatra didn’t write the words, of course, but he chose them, and he delivered them. His career is the greatest case for the artistry of the singer: he did not subcontract his records to some proto-Cowell, turning up only for vocal takes. He selected his songs, sequenced his albums, and gave his collaborators his thoughts on what would work. His love for the work of the great songwriters was evident to the end of his career: on the glut of live albums, you’ll almost always hear him naming the writers of the songs, and commenting on their genius. His personal life may have been a horror show, but Sinatra always respected the music.

5. I’ve Got You Under My Skin

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! might be beginners’ Sinatra, the easiest entry point for the newcomer, but there’s a reason for that: it’s an almost perfect album, a singer and songs in perfect tune. Robin Douglas-Home’s 1962 biography of Sinatra began with the author, on national service in Egypt, noting the radio operator had his headphones clamped on tight, paying no attention to anything around him. It turned out he was listening to Sinatra, prompting the aristocrat to investigate the singer – and it was to Songs for Swingin’ Lovers he turned. Its centrepiece was Cole Porter’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin – a performance so perfect it became impossible to imagine anyone else singing the song. It starts so lazily it’s hard to imagine how violent – is that too strong a word? I think not – it becomes. The opening verses are really the setup for what happens from 2min 17secs, when Milt Bernhart lets loose a bass trombone solo that transforms the song (it only began to work when Sinatra brought Bernhart a box to stand on, so he could be closer to mic). When Sinatra returns, his voice is taut and urgent: he has been transformed by desire, by the “warning voice that comes in the night and repeats, how it yells in my ear” – and his voice reaches upwards, grasping for heaven – “Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win? Why not use your mentality? Step up, wake up to reality.” And then, once again, he’s soothed by the inescapability of his predicament: he’s got you under his skin.

6. Too Marvelous for Words

Also on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, and chosen because of the fabulous, witty lyric by Johnny Mercer, phrased perfectly by Sinatra. That phrasing was something he’d picked up when singing with Tommy Dorsey’s band – he’d watched Dorsey playing trombone solos that were fluid and relaxed, free of sudden jerks, and changed his own breathing to enable him to replicate that in singing. That’s what makes Sinatra sound so relaxed at the mic – “easy listening” might be viewed as a putdown these days, but an awful lot of effort went into making these songs sound so easy. Combine that with his impeccable diction – there is not a single Sinatra recording on which you cannot hear every syllable of every word – and it’s easy to understand why he would value songs like this, the wittiest way possible to avoid saying “I love you”.

7. Night and Day

Riddle and Sinatra had all but hit on a formula by the time of 1957’s A Swingin’ Affair!, their attempt to recreate the magic of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Listen to their reading of Night and Day, and compare it to, say, You Make Me Feel So Young, from Swingin’ Lovers! – a bold brass fanfare to open, before it settles into a very gently swinging verse pattern (which, actually, is as near as dammit to the opening verses of I’ve Got You Under My Skin). But you can afford to be formulaic when you’ve got songs as good as this, and the voice to deliver them. Perhaps the best Sinatra reading of this song – introduced as “one of the best songs written in the world in the past 100 years” – comes on the 1962 recording of Sinatra backed by a sextet in Paris, released in 1994, on which he offers Porter’s opening “verse” – the musical prologue that introduces the song – something he excised from the Swingin’ Affair! version. The two readings are chalk and cheese, proof that one voice can offer markedly different meanings to a song about obsessive love. On the live version, backed only by Al Viola’s guitar, he’s very much trapped in the silence of his lonely room; on A Swingin’ Affair! he’s duking it out with the roaring traffic’s boom. Admittedly, Sinatra doesn’t sound all that tormented. He sounds like a superlative singer utterly in control of a superlative song.

8. Come Fly With Me

By 1958, the album concepts were getting a little shaky. Come Fly With Me was intended as a musical journey around the world, resulting in the inclusion of songs – the likes of Blue Hawaii – that weren’t really of the standard he’d been performing since joining Capitol. The title track, written to order by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, should fall into that trap. Cahn’s lyrics are pretty much distilled vulgarity – “If you can use some exotic booze / There’s a bar in far Bombay … In llama-land there’s a one-man band / And he’ll toot his flute for you” – but Sinatra’s voice and Billy May’s arrangement somehow turn it into substantially more than the little bauble it should have been. Come Fly With Me marks the point at which Sinatra’s boorish public persona starts to creep into his music, but he is so skilled as a singer that he can keep it at bay – instead of sounding like an appalling, narrow-minded bigot (which would be entirely possible with these lyrics), he manages to come across as a wry and amused sophisticate, more James Bond than Matt Helm.

9. One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)

Sinatra first recorded Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s One for My Baby in 1947. He had another crack in 1954. But only on 1958’s Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, older and graver, would he nail it in the manner that made it a staple in his shows until the end of his career, introduced as the definitive saloon song. It’s a simple song, barely a song at all – a wandering, amiable piano line, end-of-the-evening tipsy – augmented in due course with subdued strings, over which Sinatra recounts his woes to the barman he’s alone with. As Roger Moore, of all people, observed: “He always treated it like a three-act play. All of the lyrics are from the perspective of the drinker – with an introduction, a main part and a wrap-up. You never actually learn any specifics about the fellow’s woes, which I suppose is part of the song’s genius.” And the delivery is perfect: “Can’t you make the music easy and sad?” he sings, and no one has sounded more morose. He tries to sound defiant – “You’d never know it / But buddy I’m a kind of poet” – but he doesn’t convince anyone. And then, in the last lines, the passion comes in: “But this torch that I found / It’s gotta be drowned.”

10. Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)

Our last song is Sinatra by numbers, from an album – Come Dance With Me! – that was also Sinatra-by-numbers, despite winning the 1960 album of the year Grammy (albeit that Sinatra-by-numbers is still streets ahead of most singers at their absolute best). It’s included to make the case that Sinatra’s great recordings – stretching beyond the Capitol years up until the late 60s, with his concept album Watertown – serve almost as a social history of America, told through the medium of popular song. In its place as the opening track of side two of Come Dance With Me!, Saturday Night … is just a boisterous blast from someone who no longer has a partner to dance with at the weekends, but it’s also more than that. The song – music by Jules Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn – was written in 1944, and its meaning is far sadder: it’s the lament of the girl at home alone, her sweetheart serving overseas in the military. So while she doesn’t mind Sunday night at all (that’s the night friends come to call), and finds that Monday to Friday go fast, she’s stuck with Saturday, the loneliest night of the week – “’Cause that’s the night my sweetie and I used to dance cheek to cheek.” Given the plethora of Sinatra compilations available, it’s slightly amazing no one has yet put together the one that tells the story of America in the 20th century – for that is what Sinatra did, armed only with a golden voice.