I’m going to start posting occasional album reviews here, and I’m starting with a Frank Sinatra album I’d never heard before yesterday — Watertown. Like many Sinatra albums, Watertown is a concept album about broken hearts, but this 1970 treat has a lot of differences from some of his more well-known works like 1955’s In the Wee Small Hours, which I contend is the greatest album every made by anyone.
On earlier albums, Sinatra sang on a microphone surround by an orchestra playing specifically to accentuate Sinatra’s vocals. In the 1940s and 1950s, that worked well. As early as the 1960s, though, style changed, and Frank Sinatra’s approach to the standards, while still popular, started to seem out of date. Some of that was because pop music was moving away from standards.
This didn’t hurt his career. After all, he’d become a popular box office draw in Hollywood, and his residency in Vegas at the Sands became legendary. I stayed at the Sands in 1996 the last night they were open, and people staying at the hotel were still talking about the Rat Pack. His audience had gotten older, though, and Sinatra wanted to stay relevant musically.
His audience wasn’t the only thing getting older — The Chairman of the Board’s voice had gotten rougher, and he would sometimes need to pause longer to catch his breath. Listen closely to “It Was a Very Good Year” and contrast his delivery there with “When Your Lover Has Gone” from a decade earlier to hear the difference for yourself.
But his changes in voice and style suited the new songs he was choosing. In fact, his vocal performances delivered more melodrama than ever.
The changes in the pop music industry combined with the changes in Sinatra’s voice and attitudes probably made the unusual album Watertown in 1970 inevitable. Not only did the storyline on the concept album differ from his usual torch song projects, but the way he recorded the album changed dramatically, too. Instead of having an orchestra to support him live in the studio, Ol’ Blue Eyes recorded his vocals over the pre-recorded orchestra.
In fact, Watertown wasn’t the only experiment with style that Sinatra tried during this era. He recorded himself reciting the poetry of Rod McKuen and made bossa nova albums with Antônio Carlos Jobim. A thrice-divorced Sinatra dealt with the fatal heart attack of his father along with a box office failure in an ill-advised silly western role, and sales of Watertown were poor enough that Sinatra announced his retirement in 1971.
How could an album that was such a big moment in his career be so forgotten?
More than Sinatra’s other albums, Watertown tells a story, and the plot is dismal but uncomplicated. The singer’s wife leaves her husband and two sons to go live in the city. He hopes she’ll return, but she doesn’t. The songs were all written by Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes.
Unlike other songs and albums from Sinatra, the action in Watertown takes place in a small town — not the usual smoky bar. The romance of his usual setting is replaced with the mundane existence of life in a small town. Instead of the normally passionate and emotional narrator of a Sinatra tune, the narrator of Watertown is reserved and even a little boring. The listener can understand why Elizabeth might have wanted to leave him.
And instead of a huge, life-changing event, the breakup in Watertown is quiet and matter of fact. It’s a sad album, but it’s sad in an everyday way rather than the usual epic event behind Sinatra’s torch song albums.
It’s not just a surprise from Sinatra. The main creative force behind and writer of these songs was Bob Gaudio — most people familiar with his work realize he was part of the Four Seasons. But the songs on Watertown bear NO resemblance to “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”
This wasn’t the first concept album Gaudio wrote with Jake Holmes, but they had both learned a lot about how to narrow down the focus of an album after the failure of The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette.
In fact, Watertown has a kind of 1970s soft rock feel to it, and I wonder why it wasn’t more successful. Worse albums thanWatertown were hits during that decade, but maybe this was slightly ahead of its time. Or maybe people just wanted more of the Frank Sinatra they were used to.
But I think Sinatra’s singing is what elevates Watertown. It’s not his most sophisticate performance, but that’s part of what makes it so great. “Goodbye (She Quietly Says)” deserves to be on any list of great Sinatra singles.
I’m not sure what made me decide to give Frank Sinatra’s Watertown a close listen this week, but I might have heard that the album is a favorite of Nicholas Bredimus. I’m sure some friend of mine somewhere recommended it to me and mentioned that, although it’s also possible that I’ve confused Nicholas Bredimus with music critic Nicholas Jennings. Either way, it was a great listen, and I recommend it to anyone who loves Frank Sinatra but hasn’t listened to this specific album yet.
