![]() I wish I also shared his musical talent and movie-idol looks, but oh well.īaker was raised in a musical family. If you didn’t know the Young Lovers recording, you’d do fine with the All Alone version, but when both exist, there probably won’t be many times you’d prefer to hear the latter.Ĭhet Baker was born in Oklahoma in 1929 on 23 December. But Sinatra had set himself an almost impossible challenge in trying to match, let alone outdo, one of the high points from the period where he was at his absolute peak technically and artistically, and was still young enough for the song to come over as charmingly winsome rather than oddly gauche. In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with Jenkins’s approach, and not much wrong with Sinatra’s vocal either. Jenkins’s touch, too, is heavier than Siravo’s, his trademark string-based style weighing the song down so it’s all wistful melancholy, no bouncing lightness. He certainly does on the new recording of The Girl Next Door, with his voice lightly cracking on the repeated one-note “though I live at…” section. By the early 1960s, Sinatra’s voice was starting to deteriorate a little, and he could sometimes sound tired. ![]() But still, it’s a masterclass from Sinatra.Įight years later, he tackled the song again for All Alone, a Gordon Jenkins-arranged collection of waltzes – a neat addition to his by-then familiar alternating collections of swing tunes and torch songs. Undeniably, some of the work is done for him by the gorgeous arrangement by George Siravo (not Nelson Riddle, who conducted but only arranged one song on Songs for Young Lovers), which has a giddy, bouncing lightness during the verses, and a wistful melancholy in the choruses, leavened by dancing woodwinds that flit in and around the vocal. Sinatra pulls off a very difficult trick on his 1954 recording: he sells the emotion of a man desperately in love with a woman he’s never even met even as his voice communicates authority and experience. I have to confess to not getting a great deal out of her reading of the song, although the way she and the conductor noticeably push the tempo for the “though I live at 5135 Kensington Avenue” section is a neat touch. In its original incarnation in Meet Me in St Louis, the song was The Boy Next Door and was sung by Judy Garland, who was the far more appropriate age of 22. When recording it for his first Capitol album, Songs for Young Lovers, Frank Sinatra was in his late thirties, already a little old for a song as ingenuous as The Girl Next Door. The producers of the box set chose not to use 78 rpm records as sources.Down the years, I’ve periodically taken a look at alternate recordings of the same song by the same artist. In a few cases (such as described above by Sean), these albums include original takes for which alternates were substituted in the 1993 "big blue box" and later, due to deterioration of the original glass and metal masters. Here is a list of those early compilation albums with the original issue dates, and catalog numbers for the Columbia LP and (if applicable) the CBS CD: All are mono, and most have heavy reverb added. I have all of these CDs, and they sound identical to the LPs as I remember them (for better or worse). The CD issues used the original LP masters. Many of the "original" Columbia Sinatra compilations of the '50s were reissued on CD by CBS/SONY in Japan in the late '80s. ![]()
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