Sinatra! the Song Is You: A Singer's Art

by Will Friedwald

Book Overview

Frank Sinatra was the greatest entertainer of his age, invigorating American popular song with innovative phrasing and a mastery of drama and emotion. Drawing upon interviews with hundreds of his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306807424
• ISBN13: 9780306807428
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 560 Pages
• Weight: 1.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Monumental Study of Frank's Music: As Timeless as Frank

Anyone with even a mild interest in Frank's legacy should buy this book. It makes well researched and amusing reading,and is to me the finest book on popular music ever written.It helps to read an obviously great book when you agree with about 95% of his own editorializing. Every era of Mr.Sinatra's recording career,even past Duets II,and going into his last ,sometimes awkward,concerts is covered.If you want gossip,go elsewhere.Mr. Friedwald covers the personalities,from Stordahl,Riddle,May,Jenkins, and all the rest,and when you finish this book you'll feel the incredible energy, fun,and friendship that made these recordings. The fact is that Frank's canon is so great that some of my favorite recordings are not even mentioned in the index. Even Mr. Friedwald can't cover everything I guess.It's true that there are some snide comments that Mr Friedwald has for other performers,and his general contempt for rock and roll is obvious.I usually chuckled reading them since it was nice to read that the author and I agreed on the obvious. The fact is that anyone who actually knows Frank's best, and has made such an effort,must in general agree with Mr. Friedwald. For no one from the the rock era has anywhere near the oeuvre that Frank has.And in truth, the general quality of popular culture,especially music,has been in an abysmal decline for about 40 years, hopefully bottoming in the "Rap" era...This work is also a great reference,and will provide cultural enlightenment for many years to come.

THE book for Sinatra fans and those who are discovering him

What better testimonial can you give to a book than saying it makes you so fired about about its subject that you want to discover more of his/her work? Will Friedwald's Sinatra! The Song is You will delight Sinatra fans and "turn on" anyone even REMOTELY interested in finding out why Sinatra was named the 20th century's Best Singer. It is without question the best book EVER written on Sinatra's music due to its style, details and because Friedwald does not pull any punches: he praises Sinatra for good work and criticizes him for work that falls short. All this is done without pretension, cutesy-ness or padding. The usual personal and professional biographical info is there, but mostly for historical context. Friedwald's interest is in Sinatra the singer -- and in Sinatra's VOICE as an instrument that developed, matured and eventually (and sadly) deteriorated. Going through each performing and recording stage of Sinatra's long career, Friedwald analyzes particular songs, explains Sinatra's trailblazing role in creating thematic "concept" albums, and gives fascinating details on how and why certain classic arrangements and songs were cut in the studio. He praises and blasts Sinatra's various arrangers. What's unquestionable is that Sinatra took this kind of music to an entirely new level. This book successfully conveys the ARTISTRY of Sinatra's music so you WANT to hear MORE. Reading this book took me from a mild to fanatical Sinatra fan as I started listening to the albums, remembering what I had read and appreciating what Sinatra was doing with his voice. Sinatra! The Song is You heightens an appreciation of a musical genre that is either on it's way out as we move into the 21st century --or waiting for a new innovative artist to come along to revive its popularity and take it to the next level.

This Book Needed To Be Written

Will Friedwald, we Sinatra fans thank you from the bottoms of our hearts for writing this book. Before this, all we had was utter garbage, such as Kitty Kelly's lurid biography that found his singing not only incidental to his life but not even worth covering in her book! Friedwald's book, however, is solely interested in Sinara the singer, the musician and the artist. The fellow musicians who knew him in that world also knew an entirely different person from the one who was tabloid fodder. Since I own 38 of his CD albums, this book answered many questions I'd had about those albums being created. If this is the Sinatra you want to know, this is the book to read. If you want to read the tabloid seamy one about his personal life by Kelly, which I'm ashamed to admit that I did, buy it instead but don't say you weren't warned. And hers even partially ruins listening to his recordings for you for awhile. But not long since great art always rises above the garbage.

Definitive, indispensable but not the last word.

I find myself consulting Friedwald's comprehensive treatment of Sinatra's entire recording career practically on a weekly basis. If this opinionated, non-musician's aesthetic judgements are not always on target, the documentation, historical contexts, and wealth of information are simply invaluable. He's also an entertaining, lively stylist, especially when expressing his distaste for some of the low points in Sinatra's recording career, most notably the "Duets" sessions. But the ultimate book about the century's ultimate vocal artist will be one that manages to account for the apparent paradoxes: the brazen and controversial lifestyle alongside the sheer beauty and fragile emotional depth of the art ; the relation between the screen actor and the introspective "saloon singer"; and above all the relation between the inimitable individualist who made every song his own and the respectful storyteller who, more often than any other interpreter of these classic musical texts, surrendered himself to the composer's intentions and "got it right." Even in the interviews he gave following Sinatra's death, Friedwald mentioned these two apparently opposite qualities without grasping the contradiction let alone explaining it.But Friedwald's instincts about what counts as quality in musical art are unassailable, even if they lead him to unnecessarily vicious attacks on Bono (It's only a joke, Will) and Carly Simon (listen to the recording again--she does not sing in unison with Sinatra on "When I Hang My Tears Out to Dry"). Just as his zeal to dissociate Sinatra from banality leads him to demonize the opposition, his determination to vindicate the returning king leads him to ignore the embarrassment of "The Main Event," the one time when the "voice" simply wasn't there, and when it counted most--before a national television audience. Sinatra's return to form following this quasi-disaster, therefore, was all the more remarkable. Yet Friedwald gives the opposite impression, suggesting that this concert was a highlight preceding a precipitous decline in Sinatra's vocal power and aesthetic judgement. Nothing could be further from the truth--at least as far as the concerts were concerned. I know. I was there.

Great book for the serious Sinatraphile

Will Friedwald has deservedly won great acclaim for this highly entertaining "dissertation" on Sinatra's music: his vocal technique and style changes through the years, his classic albums, and his arrangers and studio musicians. Friedwald guides us album by album, grouped by arrangers Axel Stordahl, Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Billy May. Other chapters discuss his big band years and his later years. Friedwald's taste in music closely parallels my own, and I am not surprised that he is also a big fan of other great vocalists such as June Christy, Mel Torme, Ella, Chris Connor, etc. He concentrates most importantly on the concept albums and the great tracks that aren't necessarily the "big hits," but are great achievements in popular song. His suggestions on what to avoid are almost always on the mark. I was amused by his descriptions of Don Costa's "elevator music" arrangements, and of poor Linda Ronstadt, who does not fare well in this book, as some incensed readers have pointed out (lighten up! ). Friedwald has evidently interviewed hundreds of musicians associated with Sinatra in one way or another, and therein lies the greatest strength of this book. Some of his stories told by people who were there at the time are so memorable, I still chuckle when I think of them a year after I read the book. His description of the recording sessions for the Sinatra/Ellington album are a hoot. One wonders how this album is as good as it is. Also, Billy May seems like a fun character, and also a most modest fellow.This is the only book about Sinatra's music that the serious listener should trust when collecting his albums. His descriptions of the classic 50s album Close to You are the only way I have of knowing what the album is like, since it is unbelievably out of print. Yet how many CDs have My Way on them? Also, I never would have known about the great torch song album She Shot Me Down (1981), inexplicably underrated and hard to find.My only suggestion to Mr. Friedwald would be to think about the concept albums more as a whole, and how arrangers Jenkins and Riddle linked the songs together harmonically and (sometimes even) motivically. I think he will find this phenomenon in the Christy/Rugolo albums as well. Moreover, a careful listener can tell where deleted tracks were SUPPOSED to be, such as Everything Happens to Me in She Shot Me Down, The One I Love in No One Cares, and the Nearness of You in Nice'N'Easy. Big hint: Come Waltz With Me was NOT supposed to be the first track of All Alone (this would disrupt the two "bookends" of the album featuring the female vocalist), and the Nice'n'Easy album was most likely originally to be titled That Old Feeling.