Track Listing

1. You Make Me Feel So Young
2. It Happened in Monterey
3. You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me
4. You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me
5. Too Marvelous for Words
6. Old Devil Moon
7. Pennies from Heaven
8. Love Is Here to Stay
9. I've Got You Under My Skin
10. I Thought About You
11. We'll Be Together Again
12. Makin' Whoopee
13. Swingin' Down the Lane
14. Anything Goes
15. How About You?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6724 in Music
• Released on: 1998-09-08
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

Amazon.com essential recording
Sinatra already had one youthful career behind him by the time he made Songs for Swingin' Lovers! His were no longer the lustrous pipes of the kid crooner from Hoboken--the voice that made bobbysoxers swoon--but from the first notes of the opening track ("You Make Me Feel So Young") he seems to have discovered a musical fountain of youth that fully justifies the exclamation point in the album title. There's a buoyant new spring in his step, accented by Nelson Riddle's lighter-than-air arrangements, that makes the Columbia records of Sinatra's younger days sound stiff and stodgy in comparison. Even chestnuts like "Old Devil Moon," "Pennies from Heaven," "Makin' Whoopee," and "Anything Goes" are rejuvenated by his vibrant touch. Put this alongside his previous Capitol album, In the Wee Small Hours, and you have the definitive statements by both sides of Sinatra's mature musical personality: the lonely "saloon singer" and the swaggering, sophisticated swinger. Sinatra's carefree confidence achieves its supreme expression in "I've Got You Under My Skin," a performance that builds steadily to an ecstatic climax. Cole Porter may have hated his lyrical embellishments, but by the time the singer jauntily breaks the "fourth wall" on "Anything Goes" ("...may I say before this records spins to a close..."), you can't deny he's taken the title to heart. --Jim Emerson

Customer Reviews

Class Never Goes Out of Style
These recordings are now nearly fifty years old, but they contain an excitement that doesn't diminish with time. Following quickly on the heels of his success with IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS, a 40-year-old Frank Sinatra teamed up once again with arranger/conducter Nelson Riddle and created what is arguably his best album of a stellar career. Sinatra is one of those artists that each generation rediscovers for itself. As an aging Baby Boomer, I hope that audiences will continue to listen to the Beatles a hundred years from now; but I KNOW they will be listening to Sinatra--class simply never goes out of style! If you own only one Sinatra album, this is it. ESSENTIAL

Sinatra's Best
This was my introduction to Sinatra, thanks to the rave reviews it received from Downbeat critics and readers upon its release in the fifties. It still holds up as Sinatra's best-balanced, most polished swing album, the standard by which his later versions of the same songs can be compared. This is not to say that the interpretations he gives here are the definitive ones: some listeners may prefer later, looser versions of "I've Got You Under My Skin" or "Pennies from Heaven." But without this album it's pointless to judge the later versions--by Sinatra or anyone else. With this album Sinatra, more than any other male vocalist, showed what distinguishes a jazz singer from a pop crooner.

A masterpiece; too bad about the remaster
The consensus (which happens to be true) is that Sinatra's best period was the middle one, the years he recorded for Capitol Records, 1953-61. His best Capitol material was the recordings he made with Nelson Riddle as arranger. Finally, Songs for Swingin' Lovers, from 1956, is with good reason considered to be the finest Sinatra/Riddle Capitol album, at least of a swinging, non-ballad sort. Personally, A Swingin' Affair, recorded later the same year but released in 1957, comes so close that it depends on which I've listened to most recently. Certainly, if you want to convince someone that, despite his boorish personality and many musical compromises, Sinatra DID sometimes record worthwhile music, you'd do well to play them Songs for Swingin' Lovers. This is also the album that fans most often throw on the stereo when they don't want to pick nits about production, arrangements, vocals, or song selection. Everything came together perfectly---Sinatra was at his vocal peak, in simpatico settings, interpreting some of the best songs of Tin Pan Alley, and brimful of confidence and spotaneity. There's just the right mixture of tenderness and swagger; listen to the rendition of "I've Got you Under My Skin", which counts as one of the four or five best Sinatra performances on record. "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me," "Too Marvelous For Words," "I Thought About You", "Swingin' Down the Lane," "Anything Goes," "How About You?"---so many of the songs here are top-drawer, both as songs and performances, that it's mind-boggling. And there are a lot of them too---15 songs in all, uncommonly generous for the early LP era. Too generous for Capitol, which released mutilated versions of this and other Sinatra albums (Swingin' Affair also initially sported 15 tracks) amputating several songs from American pressings for decades. The true, original versions of these masterpieces were only available as imports form British EMI until the CD editions came out in 1987. Now I read from some of these Amazon reviews that these albums have suffered a further indignity by being reissued in "remastered" editions that sound terrible. I thank God that I finally bought a CD copy of SFSL a year or two BEFORE the botched remaster was dumped on the market. It's a sad and frustrating development, but much as I'd like to blame Capitol, I think we have Sinatra's daughter Tina to thank for this. She has control of the estate, the business, and most importantly, the music. I'm sure that when the decision was made to dun the public with a remaster of Frank's albums, Tina left no corner uncut. What a shame.

So get the OLDER CD (with the black left border), or get a used British EMI vinyl pressing, or get a beat-up fifties copy, or get a tape of this from a friend. Accept no substitutes, for in it's original, unabbreviated, un-20-bit-botched configuration, Songs For Swingin' Lovers is nonpareil.