Songs for Swingin' Lovers

Sinatra, Frank

album cover

Swing Is Here

We put Frank Sinatra on to snap a party to life. Or to sulk after the party's over. Or to grapple with whatever we don't understand about human nature. Because embedded in his music is something more consequential than those cream-of-the-crop top-shelf notes—there are ideas about how to carry oneself, navigate the social graces, engage the world. Sinatra sings as though the shape of his next phrase might actually have impact on his destiny. And, by extension, our own.

Of course, that's how singers rolled back in the days when they ruled Las Vegas. Even then, Sinatra's attention to detail was singular. Honoring Sinatra with a Grammy Legend Award in 1994, U2 lead singer Bono described the singer's gift this way: "Comin' through with the big stick, the aside, the quiet compliment, good cop/bad cop all in the same breath."

Songs for Swingin' Lovers is one of the best showcases for that dizzying sequence of uppercuts and jabs, in which unbridled cocksure exuberance is followed by moments of anguished soul-searching. It's among the early collaborations between Sinatra and arranger Nelson Riddle, and it shows how even when the rhythms are designed to not rattle the china, Sinatra somehow rattles the soul. On chart after ambling chart, each one decorated with a slightly different set of studio-orchestra colors, the Chairman of the Board demonstrates all the little ways exacting placement and phrasing can light up the room. His lines fall fitfully against the pattering rhythms. Or they glide along, gently increasing altitude, helped aloft by trembling strings. Or, on the reading of "Love Is Here to Stay" that is one of several definitive performances here, his phrases are steeped in a besotted, lovestruck haze.

No other American singer entertained this way, in sly bursts that formed their own iconographic musical language. Even within the canon of Sinatra "swing" records there are huge differences: Swingin' Session and More, perhaps Sinatra at his most barn-burning, is a blur of up-tempo jazz offset by one hall-of-fame ballad ("I Concentrate on You"), while A Swingin' Affair seeks a bluesier swagger. Bono called him a "singer who makes other men poets," and it takes about thirty seconds, on any track on any Sinatra record with the word "swing" in the title, to hear why.

Genre: Vocals
Released: 1956, Capitol
Key Tracks: "Love Is Here to Stay," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "We'll Be Together Again," "Old Devil Moon."
Catalog Choice: Come Dance With Me; Swingin' Session and More
Next Stop: Tony Bennett: Basie Swings, Bennett Sings
After That: Dinah Washington: Dinah Jams
Book Pages: 706–707