{"id":5986,"date":"2007-02-07T10:54:54","date_gmt":"2007-02-07T15:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5986"},"modified":"2022-10-12T13:05:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T17:05:44","slug":"frank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5986","title":{"rendered":"Frank Sinatra: “Sinatra sang about life at the bottom of the abyss. He always sounded like he lived there.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Great piece about Frank Sinatra.<\/a> In-depth analysis, really thought-provoking. And I think spot on:<\/p>\n

The other, less obvious surprise that awaits the Sinatra hunter in a music store is where his records are kept. They are in the rack called “Easy Listening,” just east of Henry Mancini and just west of the Fred Waring Singers. The assumption seems to be that anything your parents or grandparents listened to when they were young, before the advent of rock, was easy on the ears. But could anything be less easy, more unsettling than hearing Sinatra sing “One for My Baby” or “When Your Lover Has Gone,” music that he called “saloon songs” and that critics described as “suicide music”? In these songs and in many others like them, Sinatra sang about life at the bottom of the abyss. He always sounded like he lived there.<\/p>\n

No one could sing of loneliness better than Frank Sinatra? unrequited love, love gone wrong, love lost. Observers without number, noting the contrast between Sinatra’s life?always tempestuous and sometimes violent?and his tender, evocative, and sensitive singing, have wondered with the novelist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison “whether his life springs from one set of impulses and needs and his work from another, whether… Francis Albert Sinatra?a man bruised and bruising?is so divided as to be crazy.” In truth, not madness but loneliness is the key to understanding Sinatra, both the man, who dreaded solitude yet so often felt alone in the entourages with which he surrounded himself and the audiences before whom he performed, and the musician. Even his songs of joy?and no one could express unbounded happiness more thrillingly in his singing than Sinatra?were manifestations of his fundamental loneliness. Just as the athlete who crouches the lowest can jump the highest, so could the singer who sank most deeply into despair express the exhilaration of temporary release from the demons that plagued him more convincingly than anyone else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go read the whole thing.<\/a> It’s long – but if you’re a Sinatra fan, you won’t want to miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Great piece about Frank Sinatra. In-depth analysis, really thought-provoking. And I think spot on: The other, less obvious surprise that awaits the Sinatra hunter in a music store is where his records are kept. They are in the rack called … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5986"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5986"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180137,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5986\/revisions\/180137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}