I’ve never bought a Frank Sinatra album, but my parents had lots of them. This one was in our house, but I don’t think they ever played it apart from the song that goes, “there was a girl in Denver before the summer storm / Oh, her eyes were tender…” [Love’s Been Good To Me]. Frank had met this poet called Rod McKuen, who was popular in America in the late 60s and early 70s, writing maudlin poems and lyrics for songs. A lot of this album is Sinatra reading poems, and it reminds you that people forget how good an actor Frank Sinatra was.
Sinatra is playing this kind of salesman, or Don Draper kind of guy who seems to wander around America being lonely. I look at this now, at 67, and I feel a little uncomfortable about him wandering around America, having left a lot of people and wreckage behind him, and us being invited to feel sorry for him, which sort of pulls off, because his voice is incredible and the arrangements are very cinematic. A Man Alone is this very lush, sad soundtrack, a strange Disney ride you might have wanted to go on in the late 1960s. And his voice, of course, is just incredible, with perfect diction, and there are these little fireworks he deploys. One of the little poems, ‘Night’, which is about the loneliness and fear that can come to you in the middle of the night, is a really strange thing to be having on a Frank Sinatra album. I can only imagine that my father bought it by accident, expecting something else.
