Sinatra’s Waning Career
In the early ‘50s, it looked like Frank Sinatra’s career was at its end. He couldn’t get a record contract or a regular nightclub gig. However, Capitol Records’ Alan Livingston signed Sinatra to a seven-year deal in 1953 – the same year Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity.
The Themed Album
Sinatra had pushed for a decade “to make a cohesive LP at a time when no one in the record business was thinking beyond singles.” TL In 1954, he recorded a pair of albums, Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy, which both had overall thematic links amongst the songs. “Both are fine sets, but they are mostly notable because they introduced Sinatra…to a young arranger named Nelson Riddle.” RD
The “All-Time Greatest Break-Up Album”
Sinatra’s “break-up with Ava Gardner provided the perfect catalyst” TL for what has been hailed as “the all-time greatest break-up album.” RD “If you want to cry, here’s one to do it with.” ZS Sinatra’s “voice had deepened and worn to the point where his delivery seems ravished and heartfelt, as if he were living the songs.” AM “The wisecracking, finger-snapping Sinatra of popular legend is absent;” RD this is an “authoritative take on masculine loneliness.” TL This could be “considered a heart broken follow-up to his more romantically wide-eyed prior release Songs for Young Lovers.” CAD
The First Concept Album?
It is also one of “one of Sinatra’s most jazz-oriented performances” AM and “one of the finest jazz albums of all time.” CAD It “sustains a midnight mood of loneliness and lost love – it’s a prototypical concept album;” RS it is “considered by many to be the first concept album.” CAD
In real life, Sinatra had “embraced the high-rolling Las Vegas lifestyle with a vengeance. Breakfasting at five in the afternoon, he now lived a nocturnal life, making the newly written title song by David Man and Bob Hilliard a particularly appropriate one.” TB The line “‘In the wee small hours of the morning, that’s the time you miss her most of all,’ pretty much says it all.” CAD The “feeling of not being able to sleep, tossing and turning, thinking about his lover sets the mood for the entire album.” CAD
The Benchmark for Tackling Standards
Ol’ Blue Eyes “wears his heart on his forlorn sleeve” CAD as he works “through a series of standards that are lonely and desolate.” AM “Like all Sinatra songs, they’re not just beautifully sung but interpreted into drama.” TL thanks to “ravishing and heartfelt vocal phrasings” CAD from “the man with the world’s greatest diction.” ZS
“Sinatra recordings were the yardstick by which all other vocalists would be judged when it came to dealing with the American Popular Songbook.” TB “Both Tom Waits and Marvin Gaye have cited the album as one of their favorites with Waits using the album art on the cover of his own album The Heart of Saturday Night.” CAD
The Cover
The cover for Wee Small Hours “depicts late-night desolation particularly effectively, showing a solitary Sinatra smoking a cigarette under a streetlight’s baleful glow.” TB In fact, the reviewer at Cool Album of the Day even suggested playing “this album in its entirety while leaning against a lamp post preferably with a cigarette dangling out of the side of your mouth…Once you are finished put out your cigarette, down one more shot of whiskey, and leave the wee small hours of the morning behind you….and go to sleep.” CAD
The Music
Sinatra took on a deliberate “musical recipe of less-is-more” TB with “somewhat muted guitar work and the lush almost in the background string arrangements.” CAD The songs were crafted “around a spare rhythm section featuring a rhythm guitar, celesta, and Bill Miller’s piano, with gently aching strings added every once and a while.” AM The “carefully selected melancholy standards that come across with even more sublime poignancy with the expertly crafted arrangements by Nelson Riddle and his orchestra.” CAD “In hindsight, [this] is the first record where the pair really clicked.” RD
The Songs
Here are insights into individual tracks.
“Mood Indigo”
“Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo…never sounded bluer.” RD “Things seem to be getting a bit desperate for our desolate hero. In the evening when the lights are low seems to be a particularly bad part of the day for him as he calls himself just a soul that when he gets that blue indigo he could just lay down and die.” CAD
“Glad to Be Unhappy”
Glad to Be Unhappy, “the first of three Rodgers & Hart tunes, showcased a voice now deeper and more ravaged than the light tenor of early days.” TB
“I Get Along Without You Very Well”
Cole Porter’s I Get Along Without You Very Well “epitomizes the mood of the entire album and highlights Sinatra’s vocal prowess.” TB
“Can’t We Be Friends?”
There’s also “the barfly confessional of Can’t We Be Friends?” RD
“When Your Lover Has Gone”
That’s followed by “When Your Lover Has Gone, penned by Edgar Swan, a number Sinatra had originally recorded back in 1944…With a decade of life lived since then, Sinatra’s vocal performance effortlessly surpasses the earlier version – and legend has it that he broke down in the studio and cried after concluding the final take.” TB
“What Is This Thing Called Love?”
Side two of the album kicks off with a “pleading take on Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love?” RD – “a question Sinatra must have spent much time considering. Riddle’s clarinet theme here is arguably as persuasively haunting as Porter’s original melody.”
“It Never Entered My Mind”
Sinatra also tackles Rodgers and Hart’s It Never Entered My Mind, “described by one critic as ‘perhaps the definitive musical evocation of loneliness.’” TB
“I’ll Never Be the Same”
On I’ll Never Be the Same The Chairman of the Board faces “the grim acceptance that the lady’s gone for good.” TL
“Dancing on the Ceiling” and “This Love of Mine”
However, Dancing on the Ceiling “sees Sinatra daring to hope,” TB as does “a trenchant recast of This Love of Mine, a hit from his Tommy Dorsey days,” RS in which he sings “This love of mine goes on and on.”
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