638 Frank Sinatra - Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956)

Studio Album - Vocal Jazz

About the Act:

Frank Sinatra, sometimes known as "Old Blue Eyes" was an American singer of Italian-American descent and of huge success.  He is mostly associated with being a "crooner" in that his singing is a smooth jazz vocal style, with swing music, with many film roles, and with knowing influential people, including politicians, but allegedly also including Mafioso.

His career spans from 1946 to 1998 when he died. In that time he released around 60 studio albums, and goodness knows how many compilations. He has been one of the most successful singers ever and reputedly one of the most influential American men of the 20th century.

About the Album:

This as Frank's 10th studio album. It was the first ever album to top the UK albums chart.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

Frank Sinatra was a hugely successful American singer, as I'm sure you know. I strted to seriously listen to music when I was given a transistor radio when I was 10. That was 1975. This album was released 19 years before that, and as far as I was concerned at the time, this was the music that parents listened to. Not my parents, who preferred classical, but everybody else seemed to have parents that liked this sort of thing, but at the time I was not that impressed with it. 

As I grew older I didn't mellow towards this sort of croony swing, in fact I started to look down my nose at it. I mostly liked rock, and other stuff, and was generally not that impressed by singers who didn't write their own songs. Also, it was getting older and older and so was always "before my time". I didn't like the apparent shallowness of crooners, which was a double standard of course because there was plenty of shallow stuff I enjoyed immensely.

Now we are a good 45 years later, and a lot of the stuff I love is well older than this was then. There is still a big disjunct in style that happened between the 50s and the 70s - actually one of the most fertile periods in pop, during which it was transformed beyond all recognition. In 1956 this was "pop".

It's vocal jazz, mostly standards, some I know like "Making Whoopie" and "Anything Goes". Apparently it is deliberately more jazzy than some recordings of some of these songs, and the "swinging" in the title does not refer to wife-swapping, but to swinging meaning having a good time, but also swinging as in playing songs in 6/8 time ("Swing music") which this is predominantly.  It's a big band backing, with a fairly normal kind of arrangement, which includes all sorts of musical cleverness. The song-writing is definitely in this overly romanticised vein with a focus on cleverness, clever metaphors and even clever rhymes (my favourite is, "This indiscrete heart, misses the sweetheart....". I would say it is played pretty well, arranged very well, written well, and sung, of course, well. It's glossy, slick, and fluffy. I don't believe a word he sings, but that's not the point of these songs.

Now I'm old, I realise that deep and meaningful is good, true emotion is good, expressing something real about the human condition is priceless, but there is room in life for a little fluff every now and again. It's old-fashioned, it's not my formative style, but I don't look down my nose at it so much now. It's all right really.

6.8/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4kca7vXd1Wo5GE2DMafvMc

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmzP977za2bLEmZwTzpMGGJAtDZOk-bud

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_for_Swingin%27_Lovers!