Pantagruel's Full Review: Songs for Swingin' Lovers! [Remaster] by Frank Sin...
Frank Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers! is the blueprint of cool. Nelson Riddle provides snazzy big-band arrangements throughout this upbeat album but it is Sinatra's debonair vocal style that makes this a classic. He sings of falling in love with such casualness you'd swear that if he ever loses one lover he'd simply shrug it off and not be long in finding another. For proof, look no further than his version of "It Happened in Monterey" where heartache never sounded so carefree.
Sinatra was at the top of his game when he recorded this 15-song album in 1956. His movie career was doing well, but that wasn't the half of it. After having been shown the door at Columbia Records, a company that signed his checks for almost ten years, he was now in the third year of a decade long association with Capitol Records and seemed both rejuvenated and determined to prove that, at age 40+, he still had it. Thus, chestnuts written by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin ("Love is Here to Stay"), Johnny Mercer ("I Thought About You," "Too Marvelous for Words"), and Cole Porter ("I've Got You Under My Skin," "Anything Goes") are given definitive readings.
Even minor tunes that weren't very well known at the time like "You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me" and "Swingin' Down the Lane" sound like classics as they benefit from Sinatra's magic touch. I can't think of "You Make Me Feel So Young," which opens the album, as being anything but a Frank Sinatra song, even though it had been around for about 10 years before Songs for Swingin' Lovers! was made.
The way he narrates the married man blues in "Makin' Whoopee" is a hoot. Here, and throughout the album in fact, he injects the original Tin Pan Alley lyrics with hip vernacular and knowing winks, as on "Anything Goes" where on the final verse he sings "Let me say before this record spins to a close/I want you to know anything goes".
Riddle, for his part, makes sure that the arrangements remain both tight and varied. On "I've Got You Under My Skin," for example, wave after wave of crescendos slowly build up behind Sinatra's vocal then get released during the instrumental break. At other times, he colours the arrangements with various lead instruments including flute, piano, muted trumpet, and xylophone, the mallets of which rain down on the instrument like "Pennies From Heaven."
Only the somber "We'll Be Together Again" seems out of place and, at over four minutes, makes the longest cut on the album also the least interesting. It would have been a better fit on one of Sinatra's torch-themed LPs. But the rest of Songs for Swingin' Lovers! is just too strong for me not to give it a full five star rating.
The vivid orange background on the album cover is reminiscent of a romantic sunset, with Sinatra hovering above a young, swingin' couple like a cloud (or a god?) in the sky, an approving look in his eye. So swing on, lovers. Frank's got your back.
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