The guy had real potential as a singer. LOL. And I've got this swinging record. Wow. I love it. The last song I heard "This Town" was a definite swinger. Beautiful.
Some of the other stuff is just exquisite and not so swinging. Still all quite lovely. I don't know why All Music Guide gives this album 1½ stars. They don't say what the problem is. I like it.
The album is called "The World We Knew," Reprise 1022, and what I'm listening to is a stereo LP (record) of it, which I got at a thrift store the other day. Pretty good shape.
The cover of the album is a fairly dreary affair. I see for the CD version they dropped off a bunch of clutter from the cover, which on the original is a real swinging bit of liner notes (on the front!). And my copy has a big huge, 96 point radio station number, since it was part of a radio library once upon a time. This is their LP #341!
Anyway, the liner notes say:
The sun had plunged into the Pacific, somewhere southwest of Bel-Air. In Studio One, Sinatra, like the Pacific, makes his own waves. Fluorescent light turns the singer a slightly tanner shade of grey. And amid this neon's irreverent hum, the singer looks out into the plastic, humming world about him. He stands at the microphone, singing in depth. Doing his best thing ... sharing. Sinatra's songs, soon to scatter worldwide the belongings of one man's soul. He tilts his voice into a microphone, ust as he has for three decades. Decades spent in living in recording, and in singing small but poignant truths about loving. This ambiguous man, with clear, touching insights. Sinatra at a microphone, nurturing a bouquet of emotions, then plucking them in full flower, without first checking for possible thorns.
Couldn't've said it better myself. Fortunately we had Stan Cornyn to write that piece. It would've been fun to be in the recording studio, eyeballing Frank as he sang these songs -- maybe glancing away out of reverence -- then writing something so touchy feely. It's Frank, man. Frank and the Pacific Ocean. Two giants!
I'm actually not a big Sinatra guy. Far from it. But when I hear him, I wonder where I ever went wrong. I should've been.
UPDATE: For some unknown reason, the CD of this is over $50 at Amazon. Must be hard to get. But the download is just under $10, so I'd go for that. Except I have the LP and I'm recording it to MP3 as I type.
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