Frankly Speaking

In his own words, and those of people touched by his music, here are some randomly collected thoughts on Frank Sinatra:

Beyond talent

“What Sinatra has is beyond talent. It’s some sort of magnetism that goes in higher revolutions than that of anybody else.”

- director Billy Wilder

I cry out the loneliness

“If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut, I feel the loss myself, and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel. … I know what the cat who wrote the song is trying to say. I’ve been there - and back. I guess the audience feels it along with me.”

-Sinatra in a 1963 Playboy interview

Birth of a nation

“I would say that half the population of the United States over the age of 40 was conceived while their parents were listening to his records. He played a great romantic role in the country. … Sinatra got the blood flowing.”

- writer Gore Vidal

I believe

“Whatever else has been said about me is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.”

- Sinatra

Singing in complete sentences

“He sang in wonderfully long, lengthy sentences which took a great deal of work but sounded as though they didn’t. He was also a very literary singer, establishing emotional breaks in the language of the song - punctuation marks, so to speak. His records were infused with a delicious intelligence. I’d never heard anyone sing a semicolon before.”

- Jonathan Schwartz, New York disc jockey

The view from Jersey

”(Sinatra’s voice is) bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world.”

- Bruce Springsteen