Classic album of the fortnight: Frank Sinatra's Only The Lonely

Release date: 1958. Label: Capitol Records. Producer: Frank Sinatra/Nelson Riddle

Magic & Loss

There’s one particularly telling moment in Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Elvis TV special from 1960. Frank, standing by a flick-rack of album sleeves, gestures towards Only The Lonely. Wise-guy nodding to his two sidekicks, Sammy Davis Jr and Joey Bishop, he says, "I won a Grammy award for that." Then he pauses and moments later, acerbically adds the punch-line, "for the cover art work." Ironic? You bet! As great as the album-cover art is (Sinatra in Paghliacci clown mode, an image he himself favoured when painting self-portraits), it is obviously the music on this album which makes it one of the great works of art in twentieth century popular music.

Sinatra may not have actually created the concept album but he sure as hell turned it into an art form, specifically with In The Wee Small Hours (1955), Songs For Swinging Lovers (1956), Where Are You (1957) and Only The Lonely (1958). He did this by eschewing the prevailing tendency to see albums as simply rag-bag collections-of-singles, viewing each particular project as an attempt to tell what he said was "a story, with a beginning, middle and end." As such, Sinatra himself would sometimes sift through up to a hundred songs – both old ones and those that were newly composed for the album – and arrange the selected dozen or so tracks in a sequence that best told the tale. Before even entering the studio.

Indeed, after contacting Sammy Cahn and Jimmie Van Heusen to write what turned out to be the title song for this album, Sammy enquired of his boss: "You wanna call this For Losers Only?" to which Sinatra replied: "Yeah. It’s for all those losers who drink as hard as they feel."

The album’s sleeve notes, by Cohn and Van Heusen, also give us a clue as to why this album would finally end up as Sinatra’s own favourite of all those he recorded. "The Frank Sinatra that we know and have known (and hardly know) is an artist with as many forms and patterns as can be found in a child’s kaleidoscope Come Fly With Me is one Sinatra. All The Way is another Sinatra. A Sinatra singing a hymn of loneliness could very well be the real Sinatra."

Sammy was being cautious. He knew that to be true. How? He’d shared an apartment with the man earlier in the decade when Sinatra and Ava Gardner were hauling each other through their own form of heaven and hell. At one point Sinatra, clearly drinking heavily and obviously feeling hardened towards the woman, smashed a photo of Ava – then moments later, next-to-sobbing, had everyone in the room on their knees searching for the fragments of that photograph.

That, in itself, is a neat metaphor for what much of the music on his magnificent ’50s mood albums is all about – Sinatra trying to stitch back together the fragments of his tattered soul and battered male ego. Ava was – and remained – not just the love-of-his-life but a woman who, it has recently been revealed, challenged him more than any other, sexually.

Frank, since he was a teenager, had quite simply seen himself as the best-fuck-in-town, but Ava claimed even he couldn’t keep her satisfied. Especially, one presumes, when he was drinking his beloved Jack Daniels so hard, that he couldn’t, eh, get hard: in fact, Sinatra suffered periodic bouts of impotence from the late 50s onwards. There also was the fact that he’d abandoned his family for this woman, a "sin" in the eyes of most Italians, especially his murdering buddies in the mob.

These, then, are just some of the inner tensions that define Only The Lonely. And arranger Nelson Riddle, apparently as besotted with Impressionist painters and classical composers as Frank was, gave Sinatra all the space he needed to wander through this landscape as if moving from tomb-like room (‘Only The Lonely’) through the streets where he meets the woman herself (‘What’s New’), to the bedside of a dying friend (‘Goodbye’), through the all-women-are-bitches mode of moaning (‘Blues In The Night’) until he finally ends up in a bar, drinking himself into oblivion (‘One For My Baby’). Sinatra, in his impressionist mode, even told Riddle he wanted a "far less clearly defined tempo" than anything he had previously recorded. He wanted the album to float, to drift, like a drunk seeking solace in the shadows.

And, let’s not forget that Nelson Riddle later revealed that he, too, felt like he was living in the shadows at this point. Riddle’s three-month-old daughter died a few weeks before these sessions and his mother was suffering from terminal cancer. This, he said, was probably reflected in the funereal pace and tone of most of these arrangments. Indeed, Sinatra and Riddle were so in-tune, in every sense, that they got its final cut, ‘One For My Baby’ in just one take. Though, when you listen to Sinatra’s vocal remember, too, that Ava Gardner had recently aborted the child Sinatra so desperately wanted with the woman. It’s all there in the way he sings "baby."

Wilt Friedwald in his wonderful Sinatra book, The Song Is You, says Only The Lonely was "a high-point in the Sinatra-Riddle partnership that the two men would not achieve again". He’s right, at least in terms of their work together. But as for his claim that "Neither would anyone else", he’s wrong. If you want to work backwards through pop’s greatest mood albums from, arguably, OK Computer through Hissing Of The Summer Lawns and Berlin to Scott 4 and Kind Of Blue – all paths lead you back to this album. Its influence on jazz, pop and rock is incalcuable. A collection of secular hymns, it shall remain ever so.

Six of the best:

ODD FACT Where do you think Roy Orbison got the title for his breakthrough hit from 1960? And the mood he mined on countless albums such as Crying which even copied the cover of this album.

WHAT HE DID NEXT Directly after, Sinatra released the almost vulgar-by-comparison Come Dance With Me, followed by a compliation album, Look To Your Heart. He then matched, and in ways, excelled Only The Lonely by recording the barroom-to-suicide album
No One Cares, with arranger Gordon Jenkins, who had originally been pencilled-
in to arrange Only The Lonely.

STAR TRACK ‘One For My Baby’.

ACE LYRIC LINE "I still love you so" in ‘What’s New.’

MAGIC MOMENT The piano fade at the end of ‘One For My Baby’ echoing Sinatra wandering off into the distance.

RELATED ALBUMS BY OTHER ARTISTS Apart from Orbison, this directly influenced Bobby Darin’s It’s You Or No One, moodier Miles Davis recordings, Scott Walker’s albums from Scott to Scott 4, Dory Previn’s On My Way To Where, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Lou Reed’s Berlin, Bowie’s Low, etc etc. etc. Sinatra is the man!