[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

In The Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1955.
Country:
Overall rank: 378
Average rating: 80/100 (from 637 votes).

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Tracks:
1. In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning
2. Mood Indigo
3. Glad To Be Unhappy
4. I Get Along Without You Very Well
5. Deep In A Dream
6. I See Your Face Before Me
7. Can't We Be Friends?
8. When Your Lover Has Gone
9. What Is This Thing Called Love
10. Last Night When We Were Young
11. I'll Be Around
12. Ill Wind
13. It Never Entered My Mind
14. Dancing On The Ceiling
15. I'll Never Be The Same
16. This Love Of Mine

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[DommeDamian]

Not only was this probably the first real album ever, but Frank Sinatra is the OG sadboy. A lotta times when I go back to this era of music, I think maybe I am in a chill vocal jazz phase, only to find that this record captures my melancholic soul better than anything else, as much as I do dig what I jam. I can say that this is a sort of stand-in for Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart's TMR. But come on, it's number one of the Tom Club. This collection of tuneful nocturnal vocal jazz pieces puts you in a trance, not only with Sinatra's iconic crooning but also the instrumentation, rich and colorful romanticism.

The album begins with the sort of title-track that lyrically has aged the most significantly and bluntly. With everlasting words like "When your lonely heart has learned its lesson, you'd be heard if OOOOONLY she would call / In the wee small hours of the morning, that's the time you miss her most of all" it's painstakingly real. That the empathetic attention of a specific person you know won't give you what you need, as well as when you shouldn't be thinking of anything, let alone what discomforts your heart, is when you do, is indescribably on point. The fact it was written and recorded in '55 and still gets me, is proof this is a classic. The songs that follow simply tries to cope with the truthfully aching situation. The song Deep In A Dream describes the escapism and long-lost memory he craves for his love, and what I find odd but fitting about this song is that even though it's about that, it sits in the album about being awake walking through the streets in the night. A bit of a stretch but like that dream is gone, like his lover (pun kind of intended). Speaking of that, When Your Lover Has Gone has wanna the most truthful sad lyrics that rings of obvious reliability to me in "When you're alone who cares for starlit skies?", striking the emotion that naturally coming beauty means fuckall when the pain is realer and more overwhelming than it will ever be.

The big hot concept is heartbreak, and there is awareness in my opinion. He says, in I See Your Face Before Me the line "I cannot erase your beautiful face before me", which indicates he both tries, and still views his ex as something beautiful. And raise a hand to the ill wind if you see yerself in "I took each word she said as gospel truth, the way a silly little child would [...] I thought I'd found the girl of my dreams / Now it seems this is how the story ends / She's gonna turn me down and say / "Can't we be friends?"". Sinatra spoke for us sadboys before our mothers walked this Earth.

Helplessness is also the blues for a lot of these tunes, a theme also flowing through the story of my own life, and it hits with lyrics like "Cause there's nobody who cares about me, I'm just a soul who's bluer than blue can be" (Mood Indigo), "I know down deep inside I'll never be the same" (Never Be The Same) and the oh-so empathetically deep-cutting "It's a pleasure to be sad" (Glad To Be Unhappy). Perhaps my favorite is What Is This Thing Called Love, simply because it has wanna my favorite melodic progressions of any song, and Sinatra expressing in its simplicity, what this supposed love is as what he previously thought "threw his heart away". It all ends at This Love of Mine, capturing lyrics such as "Since nothing matters, let it break". It ties both into the mentioned line from When Your Lover Has Gone, but kind of his acceptance of lonesomeness and depression that he has sung throughout the innovatively 50minute album.

In the midst of all this, you forget that Sinatra doesn't have a writing credit, because he sings every single last line like it came from the purest brook in his soul. Even when breakup albums would be an acclaimed thing in the fifties' foreseeable future, it's still super difficult to find one as heartwarming as the kickstarter.
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