Backstory

     Greatest love songs?  By Frank Sinatra?  Where do you begin?  How do you even start to make the cut, to narrow down the hundreds of contenders onto one disc?     In a way, the answer is easy.  You follow your heart.       That’s what this compilation’s producer, Gregg Geller, did when he assembled these 22 slices of romance, longing, elation…all those emotions that nobody sings like Sinatra.  He started with the greatest songwriters of the era, with Cole Porter and Rogers & Hart and the Gershwins and Sinatra’s personal favorites, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.  Many of these songs—“My Funny Valentine,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “In the Still of the Night,” “The Very Thought of You,” “Night and Day,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?”—have been tackled by countless singers over the decades.  Some of them sang quite well.  But most just don’t have that casual command you find in these renditions.  When Frank Sinatra sings a song, it stays sung.       Sinatra once tried to sum up why that happened, and here’s what he came up with: “I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics,” he said, “but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over acute capacity for sadness as well as elation. I know what the cat who wrote the song is trying to say. I've been there - and back. I guess the audience feels it along with me. They can't help it. Sentimentality, after all, is an emotion common to all humanity.”      The songs on this album, of course, go way beyond mere sentiment—the voice behind them might scoff, but they’re more profound than that.  And with four songs from Sinatra’s years on Capitol Records and the rest from his days on the label he founded, Reprise, this is one of the few compilations to draw from the two most celebrated phases of Sinatra’s career.   

Credits

Song credits:

1 My Funny Valentine (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart)Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded November 5, 1953, Los AngelesFrom the Capitol album Songs For Young Lovers
2 What Is This Thing Called Love? (Cole Porter)
Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded February 16, 1955, Los AngelesFrom the Capitol album In The Wee Small Hours
3 Like Someone In Love (Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Burke)
Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded November 6, 1953, Los AngelesFrom the Capitol album Songs For Young Lovers
4 I’ve Got A Crush On You (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin)
Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded March 3, 1960, Los AngelesFrom the Capitol album Nice ’N’ Easy
5 Let’s Fall In Love (Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler)
Arranged by Johnny MandelRecorded December 19, 1960, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise album Ring-A-Ding Ding!
6 You’d Be So Easy To Love (Cole Porter)
Arranged by Johnny MandelRecorded December 20, 1960, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise album Ring-A-Ding Ding!
7 Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words) (Bart Howard)
Arranged by Quincy JonesRecorded June 9, 1964, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise album It Might As Well Be SwingWith Count Basie And His Orchestra
8 In The Blue Of Evening (Tom Montgomery-Adair, Al D’Artega)
Arranged by Sy OliverRecorded March 21, 1961, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise compact disc I Remember Tommy
9 Moonlight Serenade (Glenn Miller, Mitchell Parish)
Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded November 29, 1965, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album Moonlight Sinatra
10 I’m Getting Sentimental Over You (George Bassman, Ned Washington)
Arranged by Sy OliverRecorded May 1, 1961, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise album I Remember Tommy
11 In The Still Of The Night (Cole Porter)
Arranged by Johnny MandelRecorded December 19, 1960, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise album Ring-A-Ding Ding!
12 You And The Night And The Music (Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz)
Arranged by Johnny MandelRecorded December 21, 1960, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise album Ring-A-Ding Ding!
13 Don’t Take Your Love From Me (Henry Nemo)
Arranged by Don CostaRecorded November 21, 1961, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album The Reprise Collection
14 I Hadn’t Anyone Till You (Ray Noble)
Arranged by Don CostaRecorded November 20, 1961, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album Sinatra & Strings
15 My Heart Stood Still (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart)
Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded February 18, 1963, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album The Concert Sinatra
16 The Very Thought Of You (Ray Noble)
Arranged by Robert FarnonRecorded June 12, 1962, LondonFrom the Reprise album Great Songs From Great Britain
17 The Way You Look Tonight (Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields)
Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded January 27, 1964, Los AngelesFrom the Reprise album Days Of Wine And Roses, Moon River And Other Academy Award Winners
18 You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me (Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal, Pierre Norman Connor)
Arranged by Nelson RiddleRecorded February 21, 1963, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album Sinatra ’65
19 Night And Day (Cole Porter)
Arranged by Don CostaRecorded November 22, 1961, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album Sinatra & Strings
20 Come Rain Or Come Shine (Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer)
Arranged by Don CostaRecorded November 22, 1961, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album Sinatra & Strings
21 All The Way (Duet with Celine Dion) (Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen)
Produced by David Foster and René AngélilArranged by David Foster for Chartmaker Inc.Strings arranged by Jeremy Lubbock
From the 550 Music album All The Way...A Decade Of Song
22 Strangers In The Night (Bert Kaempfert, Charles Singleton, Eddie Snyder)
Arranged by Ernie FreemanRecorded April 11, 1966, HollywoodFrom the Reprise album Strangers In The Night

Album credits:
Compilation Produced by Gregg GellerProject Coordinator: Jo MottaDigital Mastering by Lee HerschbergEditorial Research: Charles PignoneArt Direction: Hugh Brown, Al Quattrocchi,
& Jeff SmithPackage Design: Tornado Design, Los Angeles

Awards:
“Strangers in the Night” – Number One hit, Billboard magazine charts
Record of the Year, 1966 Grammy AwardsBest Arrangement for Vocalist, 1966 Grammy AwardsBest Engineered Recording, 1966 Grammy Awards

Liner Notes

[ALL QUOTES BY FRANK SINATRA UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED] “I consider myself among the luckiest people in the world to have been able to make a career out of what I love to do—interpret wonderful music. There’s nothing like loving what you do. For sixty years I’ve done what I loved most—sing. Fortunately for me, you were out there listening. Together we got through the good times and the bad. Pretty good arrangement (you should pardon the pun). I drink to you. May you live to be a hundred, and may the last voice you hear be mine.”

“The reading of a song is vital. The written word is first; always be first. Not belittling the music, but it is really a backdrop. To convey the meaning of a song you need to look at the lyric and understand it.”

“The songwriters in my days were of a different nature. For instance, Larry Hart wrote the most sophisticated saloon kind of songs; there was always a bit of bittersweet and sadness in them. Cole Porter had that marvelous clip type of rhymes. Johnny Mercer had
great humor in his music. Every one of those men, all the songwriters, are so responsible for my career. Sammy Cahn is always there for me; he has written some very poignant lyrics in his career; touching and loving type of songs. ‘All The Way’ is a marvelous song.”

“Sinatra learned how to do that [long-lined] singing, and it really had a romantic, almost sexual kind of connotation. It was very, very seductive, a fact well known to women as well as to the men who took them to concerts. There simply had been nothing else like it before him.” —Sammy Cahn

“It takes a long time to heal a broken heart. I think being jilted is one of life’s most painful experiences. It’s happened to all of us and never gets any easier. I understand, however, that playing one of my albums can help.”

“I’m supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I admire them. But like all men, I don’t understand them.”

“If I had as many love affairs as you have given me credit for, I’d now be speaking to you from a jar at the Harvard Medical School.”

“I get an audience involved, personally involved, in a song because I’m involved myself. It’s not something I do deliberately. I can’t help myself.”

“I sang so well because I felt the lyric here and here and here here and here and here here and here and here [touches his forehead, his heart and his stomach]. Whatever the man was trying to say in the song—I’d been there. And back. I knew what it was all about.”

“If the song is a lament about the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss, and I cry out the loneliness. Being an eighteen-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overactive capacity for sadness as well as elation.”

“If Sinatra sings it, you can be sure it is about the essential dilemma of getting through the night, of relations between men and women, of insecurities, of the sadness that is shared by whole generations at certain times—the large themes that are not reported but are sung. These are not news matters. These are the matters that matter.” —Gay Talese

“They usually say that an artist is as good as his material, and I think that in 9 of 10 cases that holds true. If you’re lucky enough to get a great love song you’re ahead of the game.”

“He was the epitome of what singing was all about: beautiful sound, smooth as silk, effortless, impeccable phrasing, intelligent and full of heart.” —Barbra Streisand

“I think people admire anyone who can get up and sing a love song.”