Where Are You?

Editors’ Notes Frank Sinatra's reputation as a masterfully melancholy "saloon singer" rests largely on the torch song concept albums he made for Capitol Records in the '50s. 1957's Where Are You? was the first of those to go without the angular, artful arrangements of Nelson Riddle, instead putting Gordon Jenkins in the arranger's chair. Where Nelson dramatically offset Sinatra's voice with almost pointillist orchestral applications, Jenkins puts a plush pillow under the singer, letting Sinatra luxuriate in the sonic surroundings. Nevertheless, the songs themselves include some of the most haunting in Sinatra's catalog. "Laura" is a standard that was written more than a decade earlier by Johnny Mercer for a film of the same name, but it was defined forevermore by this recording. On "I'm a Fool to Want You," Sinatra plumbs the emotional depths of obsession and desire. Song for song, Where Are You? may bear a slightly lighter feel than 1955's epochal In the Wee Small Hours, but then, so does anything short of Apocalypse Now.