The 1955 album that reduced Frank Sinatra to tears
The concept of Frank Sinatra ever being angsty is hilarious. The man should have had an emo fringe for getting deep into all his feelings.
Yet with all joking aside, it was clear that in the mid-1950s, he really wasn’t in the best of moods. Given that the past few years had been marked by a major slump in his popularity, it was probably only natural that ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ was a little less than optimistic about his prospects. Of course, everything was set to change, but he didn’t know that at the time.
As such, the 1955 album In the Wee Small Hours was moody, to put it in the plainest possible terms. Sinatra was not the charming, swooping showman that his legacy would come to have him be known as, but instead, he was downtrodden, aloof, melancholic, and depressingly sad. It was hardly fun times all around.
In this sense, it wasn’t exactly surprising that he didn’t have an absolute ball recording it, either. When you’re trying to create an atmosphere over the course of 16 songs that bottles all your heartbreak into one, you can’t really be seen to be having a laugh behind the scenes. Instead, you’d more likely find Sinatra trying to dry his tears.
With songs like ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘Glad to Be Unhappy’, it was a miracle that he didn’t fall into a deep state of depression, to be honest. Yet he only got to the end of the album’s first side before it all proved too much, and after hearing the master recording of ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’, he broke down into inconsolable sobs.
Sinatra was very much a man who was being kicked while he was down at that time. He and his first wife, Nancy Barbato, had separated on Valentine’s Day, and even though he very quickly got with Ava Gardner in the aftermath, that relationship was severely ill-fated, and she left him just as his career comeback was getting started, shortly after the release of From Here to Eternity.
There is a very sombre reason why many of the tracks on In the Wee Small Hours were dubbed ‘the Ava songs’, as they were the direct product of his sheer heartbreak and depletion. He was, however, about as subtle as a slap in the face – because if you weren’t getting the message from songs like ‘Can’t We Be Friends?’ and ‘I’ll Never Be The Same’, then there must be something wrong.
The irony was, of course, that this well of sadness was what actually propelled Sinatra to new heights. Despite the aching melancholy of the album, it saw his career surge once more, and even though he was in a low mood, his blue eyes started to shimmer in the moonlight again. Somewhere amid the tragedy, that’s when he knew things were going to be alright.
As much as it obviously pained him at the time, in reality, Sinatra truly needed the tumultuous breakdown of his successive relationships in order to transform him back into a star. Beauty is pain, as they say, and the Chairman of the Board really did need to weather the storm before the clouds would pass.
