282. Frank Sinatra, "In the Wee Small Hours"

 


Why so blue, Frank?  Because you're breaking up with Ava Gardner and everybody's cheating on each other?  That's the story, anyway.

This album is very much not my thing.  It's all Great American Songbook stuff, except for the title track, and let me betray my simpleton nature by saying it's kind of a fucking drag.  There's a lot of Rodgers and Hart, Hoagy Carmichael,  a Cole Porter.  The songs all sound very similar - Frank crooning over sparsely arranged strings - and there's not a ton to differentiate them.  Maybe it would be good background music at a dinner party in 1957.

The only song I really could say I liked a lot on this album is the title track, which of course I was already familiar.  It really does do a good job of depicting that feeling when you're awake in the middle of the night brooding over a girl (or guy, I suppose, it's the same feeling I'm sure).  The cover art is also bomb.

(If you want to read a very good, excellently detailed review of this record by someone who knows a lot more about it than me, here you go.)

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I don't know, man.  Probably but I'm the wrong person to ask.

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