My Nat King Cole habit could get very expensive.

There’s this massive Collector’s Choice reissue project, you see, and I’m only beginning to realize that my greatest hits CD The World of Nat King Cole just doesn’t do it for me any more. After all, those tracks were tailored to the commercial sound of the 1950s and 1960s when Nat King Cole was a mainstream pop star. The deeper I get into his more idiosyncratic cuts, the more I discover the artist underneath the chart-topping record star – and the more I’m dazzled by what he could do.

So here we go with two more albums, This Is Nat “King” Cole (1956) and The Very Thought of You (1958). As a child of the 60s, I’m conditioned to think in terms of songwriters, which means I’m flummoxed by how many different songwriting teams show up on these albums. By this stage in his career, I’m guessing Capitol had a revolving door of songwriting pros producing material specifically for Cole’s warm and expressive voice.

You really see this at work on This Is Nat “King” Cole, a collection of songs originally designed as singles. They all conform to the never-fail formula for Cole hit singles in 1953-6 (the last gasp of the pre-Presley pop world): romantic ballads and “swinging” love songs with lush Nelson Riddle arrangements. As it happens, the ballads predominate, which makes my fast-forward finger get itchy—sure, his sincere renditions of “Too Young To Go Steady,” “Forgive My Heart,” and “Annabelle” would be nice surprises on a shuffle, but when you hear them one after the other, it's a bit too much sugar to take all at one go.

Luckily, Riddle’s touch is much lighter when he goes for a Latin-tinged sound, as in the deft “Nothing Ever Changes My Love For You” or the pulsating samba “To the Ends of the Earth,” both of which Cole handles with intoxicating suavity. On breezy numbers like “Someone You Love” and “That’s All,” Cole's witty, confident delivery lifts the song right over the frontloaded strings. It's amazing how his voice skates above the lyrics, using the same delayed attacks and little glissandos that were his trademarks as a jazz pianist.

One team that gets repeat credit on the album is Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh--McHugh was a close friend of Cole’s, and these three songs were all from a failed Adamson-McHugh musical that Cole did his best to promote. Two of them, “Love Me As Though There Were No Tomorrow” and “Too Young To Go Steady,” get the expected dated commercial treatment, but the one uptempo number, “I Just Found Out About Love,” is absolutely dynamite – Riddle’s jazzy horns and strings neatly accent the song without overwhelming it.