1. Frank Sinatra — In The Wee Small Hours (1955)
I love Frank Sinatra. My parents didn’t try to introduce me to a lot of music; to be honest, their listening habits were relatively limited compared to mine today. But they got me into Frankie.
There’s a bar here in San Francisco called Martuni’s, where anyone can sing standards with a live piano for a crowd of martini guzzlers. In the early days of my relationship with my now-wife, I’d sing “Fly Me To The Moon” to her. It was pretty romantic, if I do say so myself. And she never made fun of me for it. I wound up singing it to her at our wedding, to open our first dance.
So it was a bit of a rude awakening to discover that In The Wee Small Hours is a concept album about heartbrokenness, loneliness, and losing the one you love. Every single song on this album is overtly, some might say aggressively sad. I could only picture Frank sitting in a dark corner of his house, pouring whiskey after whiskey, singing “woe is me” by his lonesome.
I find the idea of a Frank Sinatra concept album enticing. As an artist who never wrote a song or lyric himself, In the Wee Small Hours is effectively a mixtape written to his then-wife (the 2nd of 4) Ava Gardner. It’s a breakup album like few others; a bit one note, a bit slow, but the feeling in each song is palpable.
All in all, not a bad start to this experiment.
One Essential Song:
Listen on Spotify:
