The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Frank Sinatra · arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle · Capitol · the 12-inch LP W-581 · sixteen tracks, eight to a side
Mode
The popular song as torch song; standards of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley sung slow, with one lyric of the singer’s own
Mythos
The lover awake while the world sleeps; the vigil of the abandoned through the night; the figure alone under a street lamp, fixed by the cover
Phase
Sixteen tracks, eight to a side; the title song opens the night and the singer’s own words close it; songs of denial and songs of memory alternate; no dawn
Presentation
Album; the 12-inch Capitol LP W-581 of 1955, mono, sixteen tracks in their original order, recorded in Hollywood, mostly in February and March 1955
Register
Slow and medium-slow throughout, low in dynamic; a voice near speech over strings, woodwind, piano and rhythm that stay at the edge of hearing
Scale
One man, one room, one street, one hour; a couple held from absence; the songs of the singer’s youth carried as a tradition
Governing Proposition
A popular singer on the way back from ruin gives a whole long-playing record to one hour of the night and one condition, sixteen slow songs of a love that has ended, and the record shows that loss is a duration rather than an event, and that a man telling himself he is glad to be unhappy can be heard, in the same breath, to be lying.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on its hour. The title song, by David Mann and Bob Hilliard, sets the voice over a few strings at the time of night it names, and the hush it makes is one the record rarely breaks in the fifteen songs that follow. Nothing is announced and nothing is argued. A man is awake while the world sleeps, and the song says when, and the rest of the record is spent inside that time. It is the first of sixteen slow songs, and it tells the listener at once that there will be no relief.
The album is the 12-inch long-playing record issued by Capitol in 1955, catalogue W-581, in mono: sixteen tracks, eight to a side, recorded in Hollywood, mostly in February and March 1955. Nelson Riddle arranged the songs and conducted a small orchestra led by strings, with woodwind, piano and rhythm. Every track is slow or medium-slow; there is no up-tempo number on the record. Sinatra was thirty-nine. His comeback had begun with From Here to Eternity (1953) and with his first Capitol albums with Riddle, Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy!, both of 1954, records on the smaller ten-inch disc.
The songs are standards. Rodgers and Hart wrote three of them, Harold Arlen two; Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Alec Wilder, Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, and Duke Ellington are among the rest. These are the songs of the singer’s youth, sung by a man of his age, and they are carried as a tradition, Broadway and Tin Pan Alley held in one voice. The record is judged as it was first issued, in this sequence, which every later edition keeps; reissues with tracks added are not the work.
Movement II
Third and fourth on side one stand two songs of denial in a row. “Glad to Be Unhappy”, by Rodgers and Hart, and “I Get Along Without You Very Well”, by Carmichael, are both claims a man makes about his own recovery, and Sinatra sings both so that the claim is heard as a wound. The voice drops to near speech, holds its breath over the end of a line, and undoes the sentence it is singing. Later on the same side “Can’t We Be Friends?” is the bargain of the defeated. What the record discloses is here: not sadness, which any record of sad songs would disclose, but the way a man lies to himself about a loss, and the voice that shows the lie.
In 1955 that was a disclosure in popular music. The idol of the bobby-soxers gave a whole record to an adult vulnerability, with no consolation and no turn to hope, and sound carries the meaning as fully as the words do. It is a meaning that can be stated and that holds. It is also narrow. The condition is rendered more than articulated, and it stays inside one man and one loss; nothing in the record reaches past the bedroom and the street, and the disclosure, true as it is, stops short of the bar the summit sets.
The form is the instrument of what the record knows. A single song of loss is an event; sixteen of them at one slow tempo, in one hour, are a duration, the form of a night that does not end. The long-playing record made that possible, and the album is built to its length. Across the sequence, songs of denial and songs of memory alternate as they do in sleeplessness, and Riddle keeps the orchestra at the edge of hearing so that the voice is alone. What the form does not reach is the inside of each track: every one is a standard set as a song, and nothing in it is shaped by the whole.
Movement III
Second on side two, Arlen and Harburg’s “Last Night When We Were Young” is one of the record’s two heights, and three tracks later Rodgers and Hart’s “It Never Entered My Mind” is the other. In both the beauty is of grief, among the highest in the American song on record. In the Arlen the long line is held to its end as if the breath were the memory; in the Rodgers and Hart the record’s one condition is stated at its plainest. “When Your Lover Has Gone” and “Ill Wind” darken the colour toward dread without raising the volume. The height is frequent across the sixteen tracks, and it is always of one kind: beauty held low, never grandeur or terror.
The singer’s craft is load-bearing. The breath carries a line through its bar lines; the diction places every consonant; the voice is set a few inches from the ear, near speech, and keeps its pitch and tone there. These two songs are lessons in sustained line. Riddle’s charts are spare and exact, strings, woodwind and piano behind the voice, colour used sparingly, the orchestra answering rather than accompanying, and the recording keeps the voice present and the band in depth. The costs are small: the palette is narrower and the charts more uniform than Riddle’s later Only the Lonely, and a few middle tracks are set by formula.
Those middle tracks are where the subtractive test bites. “Deep in a Dream” and “I See Your Face Before Me” make nearly the same move, “I’ll Never Be the Same” restates what its side has said, and “I’ll Be Around” is lovely without rising. Sixteen songs at one tempo is a scale the mood permits rather than compels. Singers have studied these readings for seventy years as a model of breath, line and diction, and the record keeps yielding on return because each line is inflected; but the yield is in the performance more than the meaning, and the songs’ own deep lives belong to the songs.
Movement IV
Sixth on side two, the record turns a bright Rodgers and Hart stage song into a memory of joy, sung as if the dancing were a ghost in the room. It has no substitute in the sequence, and it is the nearest the record comes to building a figure in the music rather than in the frame. The archetype is old and well evoked: the lover awake while the world sleeps, the vigil of the abandoned, a figure as old as Sappho’s moon setting at midnight. The cover fixes it, Sinatra alone at night on a street under a lamp. But the figure is made by the title, the cover and the one mood more than by structure; the night has no passage through it and no dawn.
The song also shows the record’s one law at its widest stretch. “Mood Indigo”, Ellington’s blues, is second on side one; “Dancing on the Ceiling” is a dance song from the stage; they come from different worlds, and both are bent to the same rule of slow tempo, low dynamic, the voice confiding and the orchestra receding. Porter’s wit in “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and Arlen’s dread in “Ill Wind” obey it too. The coherence is real and the range of sources wide. The law is easy to keep, though, because it allows one tempo and one mood, and the range it governs is a range of material, not of feeling.
The turn the record made was to the long-playing record as one sustained mood, with no up-tempo relief and no hit single built in, and to arrangement as atmosphere, sparse and string-led where the band of the day would have swung. The stake was real: the comeback was not yet secured, and a record of despair from a crooner who had been written off was a wager. The path was prepared. Songs for Young Lovers had already sequenced a mood, the instrumental mood albums of the early 1950s had shown the market, and the albums of the Columbia years came before. The swerve is the extension, and the extremity of the mood.
Movement V
The record closes on “This Love of Mine”, a song whose lyric is Sinatra’s own, and so ends the night in the singer’s own words. Nothing resolves. What the record holds lies close together: one mind awake between denial and memory, the couple held from absence in every song, a street and a lamp at the edge, and the songs of the singer’s youth carried as a tradition. Labour, the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and the axis that counts what a work holds is the lowest of the twelve at 6.6.
What followed is the record’s reach. It is widely held among the first concept albums in popular music. The Capitol theme album of Sinatra and Riddle became a model, followed by Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956), and the torch album became a form, to which Sinatra himself returned in Only the Lonely (1958) and No One Cares (1959). The line often drawn from it to the rock concept album is contested and is not counted. Seventy-one years on the record survives whole, in print and heard as issued, and its title song is still sung; its presence runs more through the singer and the songs than through the record as a unit, and its mono strings belong audibly to 1955.
Kind of Blue, a record of 1959 held as one mood, stands at 8.8 here and builds more of its mood into form; Blood on the Tracks, a record of a man after love has ended, stands at 8.6 and says more in its own songs. Let It Bleed stands level at 8.2. This record stands at 8.2 in Tier IV. Its making is of the first rank, and its greatest things are the singer’s readings of songs others wrote. What holds it from the summit is four of the five gated axes: the disclosure stays inside one condition, the figure is evoked by the frame, the swerve took a proven path, and the reach, though real, is shared with what came before.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds the sequence more required than any one song. Each track is a slow song of loss in a related key of feeling, and several could go with little loss to the whole: “Deep in a Dream” and “I See Your Face Before Me” make nearly the same move, and “I’ll Never Be the Same” restates what its side has already said. But the test bites where it should. The title song opens the night and sets the hour; “Mood Indigo” turns Ellington’s blues into the singer’s colour; “Dancing on the Ceiling” has no substitute; and “This Love of Mine” closes the record in Sinatra’s own words. The length is permitted by the mood rather than compelled, and is not charged; the interchangeability is.
Score: 7.9 / 10
What the record brings into the open can be stated: a grown man alone after love has ended, and the lies he tells himself about it, exposed by the voice that tells them. “Glad to Be Unhappy” and “I Get Along Without You Very Well” are songs of denial, sung so that the claim is heard as a wound; “Can’t We Be Friends?” is the bargain of the defeated. In 1955 that was a disclosure in popular music: the idol of the bobby-soxers giving a whole record to an adult vulnerability, without consolation or a turn to hope. Sound carries it as fully as words, and is credited fully. Held below the gate because the condition is rendered more than articulated, and stays inside one man and one loss.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Height of one kind, very frequent. The title song sets a hush, voice over a few strings, that the record rarely breaks. “It Never Entered My Mind” and “Last Night When We Were Young” reach a beauty of grief among the highest in the American song on record: the Arlen especially, where the long line is held to its end as if the breath were the memory. “When Your Lover Has Gone” and “Ill Wind” darken the colour toward dread without raising the volume. Across sixteen tracks the frequency is high. What holds it from the top is the single register: the sublime here is beauty held low, never grandeur or terror, and at one tempo several middle tracks, “Deep in a Dream” and “I’ll Be Around” among them, are lovely without rising.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The archetype is old and is evoked well: the lover awake while the world sleeps, the watch of the abandoned through the night, a figure as old as Sappho’s moon setting at midnight. The title song names the hour, the cover fixes the figure under a lamp, and “Ill Wind” and “Mood Indigo” turn weather and colour into fate. The particular stays particular: a voice, a room, a street. But the figure is built by the frame, the title, the cover and the one mood, more than by the music’s structure; there is no passage through the night, no dawn, and no figure but the singer. “Dancing on the Ceiling”, a memory of joy as a ghost in the room, comes nearest to a built figure. Myth evoked, and well.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the popular singer’s record as a set of singles, the 10-inch ballad collection, and Sinatra’s own Columbia years. The turn is to the long-playing record as one sustained mood: sixteen slow songs of loss chosen for one hour of the night, with no up-tempo relief and no hit single built in. Riddle’s turn is to arrangement as atmosphere, sparse and string-led, where the band of the day would have swung. The stake was real: the comeback was under way and not secured, and a whole record of despair from a crooner who had been written off was a wager. What holds it below is that the path was proven. Songs for Young Lovers (1954) had already sequenced a mood, and the instrumental mood albums of the early 1950s had shown the market.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record loses its one knowledge: that loss is a duration, not an event. Sixteen songs at one slow tempo, in one hour, are the form of a night that does not end, and no single song can say it. The 12-inch LP made it possible, and the record is built to its length: eight to a side, the title song first, the singer’s own lyric last. Denial (“Glad to Be Unhappy”, “I Get Along Without You Very Well”) and memory (“I See Your Face Before Me”, “Last Night When We Were Young”) alternate as they do in sleeplessness. Riddle’s charts belong to the form, the orchestra at the edge of hearing so that the voice is alone. Inside each track, though, a standard is set as a song, and nothing is shaped by the whole.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over seventy years, mostly of one kind. Singers have studied Sinatra’s phrasing on these tracks as a model of breath, line and diction, and the record is the reference for the torch album as a form; Sinatra’s own Only the Lonely (1958) and No One Cares (1959) are, among other things, returns to it. The literature is real but narrow: chapters in the books on Sinatra and his records, more about the making than about meaning. The record keeps yielding on return, because the readings are inflected line by line; but the yield is mostly performative, not semantic. The songs have deep lives of their own apart from this record, and that depth is not credited to it. Held below Kind of Blue, which has been studied far more widely as structure.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is popular vocal music of the 1950s and the new long-playing record. The intrinsic force is considerable: the record showed that a popular album could be a single statement of mood, conceived for its length and heard whole, and that a singer’s interpretation could carry a record of standards as a work. It is widely held among the first concept albums in popular music. The credit is shared: the albums of Sinatra’s Columbia years and his own 10-inch records with Riddle came first, and the format did part of the work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Capitol theme album of Sinatra and Riddle became a model, followed by Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Only the Lonely (1958), and the torch album became a form; the line drawn from it to the rock concept album is contested.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over seventy-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as issued: the mono record has been kept in print and reissued, its sequence intact. Presence is continuous: the record is heard whole, the title song is still broadcast and still covered, and the album stands in the lists each generation makes. The charges are small. Presence is wide among listeners of the American song and narrower among the young than that of Kind of Blue, which stands a tenth higher at sixty-seven years; much of this record’s circulation runs through its songs and its singer rather than the record as a unit. The fabric is of its year, the mono strings and the crooner’s microphone audible as 1955, though the restraint of the arrangements dates less than the full orchestras of the time.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, and the singer’s craft is load-bearing: breath control that carries a line through its bar lines, diction that places every consonant, and a way with the microphone that sets the voice a few inches from the ear, near speech, without losing pitch or tone. “It Never Entered My Mind” and “Last Night When We Were Young” are lessons in sustained line. Riddle’s arrangements are spare and exact: strings, woodwind and piano set behind the voice, colour used sparingly, the orchestra answering rather than accompanying. The recording keeps the voice present and the band in depth. The costs: the orchestral palette is narrower and the charts more uniform than Riddle’s later Only the Lonely, and a few middle tracks are set by formula.
Score: 9.1 / 10
One law governs the record: slow tempo, low dynamic, the voice confiding and the orchestra receding. Take the two most distant elements. “Mood Indigo”, Ellington’s blues, and “Dancing on the Ceiling”, a bright Rodgers and Hart stage song, come from different worlds, and both are bent to the law: the blues becomes the singer’s colour, the dance becomes a memory. Porter’s wit in “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and Arlen’s dread in “Ill Wind” obey it too. That is real coherence, and the range of sources is wide. But narrowness is not coherence, and the law here is easy to keep because it allows one tempo and one mood. The range across which it holds is a range of material, not of feeling.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held fully: one mind awake at night, between denial and memory. The couple is held, from absence, in every song. The city is held at the edge, a street and a lamp at a small hour, more by the cover and the title than by the music. The inherited American song of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley is carried as a tradition, and with it, unstated, the singer’s own past, since these are the songs of his youth. Labour, the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that what is held lies close together, in one voice and one condition. The figure describes this record’s reach.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.1, then The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Sublime at 8.6. A voice whose breath, diction and nearness to the microphone carry sixteen slow songs, with spare and exact charts behind it; a record that has survived seventy-one years whole and in print; and a beauty of grief reached again and again, at its highest in Last Night When We Were Young and It Never Entered My Mind.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: one mind awake at night, the couple held from absence, a street at the edge and the songs of the singer’s youth carried as a tradition, with labour, the family, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, the vigil of the abandoned evoked by title, cover and mood rather than built by the music; The Inevitable at 7.9, a sequence more required than several of its songs; and The Swerve at 8.0, a real wager on a path already proven.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.9 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.2, below 9.0.
Basis · In the Wee Small Hours, the 12-inch LP as first released by Capitol in 1955, catalogue W-581, mono, sixteen tracks in their original order, eight to a side; arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle; recorded in Hollywood, mostly in February and March 1955; judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception, with no recording in hand. Side one: In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning; Mood Indigo; Glad to Be Unhappy; I Get Along Without You Very Well; Deep in a Dream; I See Your Face Before Me; Can’t We Be Friends?; When Your Lover Has Gone. Side two: What Is This Thing Called Love?; Last Night When We Were Young; I’ll Be Around; Ill Wind; It Never Entered My Mind; Dancing on the Ceiling; I’ll Never Be the Same; This Love of Mine. Later editions with tracks added are not judged. The words bear on The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep only; songs are cited by title, and no lyric is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the month of release, the producer, the date of each session, the players, the instruments that colour particular tracks, the running time, the year each song was written, any issue of the material on ten-inch discs, and the books and singers named in accounts of the record’s influence; the singer’s private life is not used, and the record’s chart history and listings are not counted.