Frank Sinatra Discoveries

If asked to name a Sinatra track, most of us would go straight to his signatures ("My Way," "Fly Me to the Moon"), but it pays dividends to go deeper than Frank's most-played phrases and melodies. Here, we prove that the man's genius extends way beyond his household hits and saturates every page of the great global songbook, not unlike bourbon on a bar napkin. "The Second Time Around" (1961) picked up a Record of the Year GRAMMY®, but it was originally written (by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen) for Bing Crosby, and finds the Chairman in a reflective mood, as does "Here's That Rainy Day," for which Sinatra held a soft spot — hence its inclusion in his 1973 comeback special, Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back. "The Coffee Song" may be a novelty track, but it's still three minutes of percolated perfection.

In Next Steps, Sinatra channels Bogart and the bossa nova.

In our Sinatra Discoveries Basics, we heard Frank observe that "there's an awful lot of coffee in Brazil," and here we find him again tipping his fedora in the direction of South America, first with a lush, slinky version of "Brazil" — originally titled "Aquarela do Brasil" ("Watercolor of Brazil") by Rio-based songwriting legend Ary Barroso — then with "Dindi" from his outstanding 1967 bossa nova album, Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim: don't expect Latin fire here, but infinite subtlety and boundless pleasure, as Frank's phrasing and Jobim's finessed guitar transport us to the warm shores of devotion. And even though we all know Dooley Wilson's version of "As Time Goes By" from Casablanca, Sinatra makes us hear it for the first time . . . all over again.

We look at Frank's Capitol tracks afresh, in Deep Cuts.

Believe it or not, Sinatra was stuck in showbiz limbo the end of 1952 — his voice had inevitably lost the dreamy flush of youth, and he was without a contract . . . but he reversed his fortunes in spectacular fashion by picking up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for From Here to Eternity, and by signing to Capitol Records and reminding the world what it had been missing. His first session with arranger Nelson Riddle, in 1953, produced a song inspired by that great comeback movie, and it marked Frank's return to form. Almost three decades further down the line, Sinatra would again come back from a lay-off (after his later live-in-Vegas years) with the triple album Trilogy: Past, Present & Future (1980): "Summer Me, Winter Me" is an understated stunner.

For most artists, a selection of tracks like these would represent an A-list, but it's a measure of Frank Sinatra's astonishing talent that we can label these songs discoveries. We're sure you'll recognize many of them, but we've also tried to offer a surprise or two. Part of Sinatra's gift was his ability to inhabit existing, sometimes overlooked songs and reinterpret them so that they would positively glow with popular appeal — and that's exactly what we find here, as he puts his stamp on the jazz standard "Send In the Clowns" and the George Harrison-penned Beatles ballad "Something." Whether he's crooning youthfully through "Blue Moon," reinventing the bossa nova with Antonio Carlos Jobim on "How Insensitive," or cooking up an intriguing collaboration with poet Rod McKuen on A Man Alone, Frank wears his material like a second skin.