Search - Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey :: Love Songs

I'm tellin' y'all, Sinatra's younger years were his best...

Nathan | Charlotte, N.C. United States | 04/26/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Man, I can't think of nothin' better than listening to Frank Sinatra sing about some love and romance, 'specially when the recording is so old, it crackles through your speakers like your listenin' to radio in the '40s, and jus' immerses you in nostalgia. When you consider that my favorite genre of music is hip-hop, it's quite a feat for a vocalist such as Sinatra to wedge his way into my CD collection, much less become probably my all-time favorite singer. Now maybe I'm trippin', 'cause most people who consider themselves Sinatra afficionados say that his long tenure at Capitol in the '50s were his best years, but, in my personal opinion Frank was at the top of his form during his years at Columbia between 1943 and 1952. This was back when he was a true crooner, who stood up on stage calmly, closed his eyes, and poured all his emotion into that microphone while the girls in the audience grinned, went cross-eyed, and melted to the floor. While this collection is pre-Columbia Records (he was still with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra) I think it definitely set the stage for his up and coming years when he'd finally be recognized as a singer on all his own terms. Recorded between 1940 and 1941, what you have here is a 25-year-old Frankie putting down some killer songs in that way that only he can. It's great to hear the band playing behind him, but the voice is everything. This was a time when singers would become the center of attention in the music world. Every song has that lush romanticism of that wonderful time period. My favorite numbers in this collection are 'Violets for Your Furs' and 'Night and Day'. This was a legend about to reach his peak, before the rumors, before he fell in love with Ava Gardner, before he won the Oscar, before the great big Hollywood party known as The Rat Pack, before he hung with the President, back when he was simply Frankie, the self-proclaimed hoodlum from Hoboken."