Frank’s world

‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.’ Who was Bob Dylan talking about earlier this year? Woody Guthrie? Elvis Presley? Or maybe, halfway through the sixth decade of his own career, himself? But no. The man in question was Frank Sinatra — the inspiration behind Dylan’s latest album, Shadows in the Night.

That record is a collection of covers —from the great American songbook — ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘The Night We Called it a Day’, ‘What’ll I Do’. We call such songs standards, as if they have been set, if not in stone, then at least on the stave, forever. But that isn’t so. The fact is that when these songs were first performed, 70, 80, 90 years ago, they didn’t sound anything like the moody tone poems right now echoing around your head. They sounded like light opera: all barrel-chested bombast and hammy vibrato trills. The moody tone poems were pretty much invented by Sinatra — the man who standardised the standards. Nobody, not even Dylan, who has no real singing voice and who often enough bends his own numbers out of all recognition, can cover a Sinatra song without sounding something like Sinatra.

Sinatra sounded like Sinatra because he did more than just hit the right notes in the right order. (Sometimes he didn’t even do that. Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter were forever imploring him to please sing their songs as they’d written them.) He sounded like Sinatra because he made decades-old songs sound as though they were being written in blood as he sang them. Long before rock ’n’ roll critics had invented their cult of artistic authenticity, Sinatra had turned the 32-bar song into a fully expressive form.