Liner Notables: Frank Sinatra - In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning, Only The Lonely, No One Cares, Point Of No Return

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits... 

The adage that “you can’t tell a book by looking at its cover” may apply to record albums, too. The forced, sad-clown persona suggested by Frank Sinatra’s Only The Lonely (1958), is an off-putting depiction, even though it was a Grammy-winner for album design. It seems so unlike young Ol’ Blue Eyes, such big top bathos skewed for this arguably bleakest of Sinatra's Capitol Records' series of melancholic saloon song sessions. 

But can you always tell an album from its liner notes? Even a lone yet telling tidbit culled from the Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen-written notations for Only The Lonely — that the album was originally going to be called "For Losers Only" — could support a case that this LP‘s commentary reflects its dreary, defeatist concept. “‘Scuse me while I disappear,” “Angel Eyes” ends, and we almost expect to see the singer slink off into thin air.

But to explore further, the liner notes for 1954’s superb In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning — an album whose cover is the hands-down winner in evoking a 3AM-of the soul sense of despair -- points out that, when Sinatra sang, “he created the loneliest early-morning mood in the world.” It’s an insomnia-fueled heartbreak darkly conveyed even in the first sung notes of the lead-off title track. Was Sinatra's recent split with Ava Gardner too much on his mind?

Point Of No Return (1961), a collection of ballads resonant with “The bittersweet memory of tender moments to which there is just no return,” has “an extra ingredient that intensifies” the forlorn feeling: “For these songs all express,” the commentary reads, “the special longing that comes with the memory of a September not spent alone, or an April when someone did care. Every one of them is a revelation of a human being with a heart that beats, experiencing a sort of moment of truth…”

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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