A MAN ALONE
By Mahnuel Muñoz
“A Man Alone” is a 1969 beautiful album in which Frank performs songs by the poet and musician Rod McKuen. It is the only album – not counting compilations – in Sinatra’s discography dedicated to a single composer. An album that was not understood in its day and that, although over the decades it has acquired the rare status of a cult work, will not be honored with a commemorative edition or with reviews in the media, which is deeply unfair, since it portrays the Sinatra of 1969 much more faithfully than the triumphalist “My Way.”
SINATRA DISCOGRAPHY (1969) “A MAN ALONE”
The eleven songs that make up the album are about loneliness, and in 1969, Frank Sinatra is a lonely man.
Like so many great stars in the entertainment world, he lives surrounded by people, loved by millions of strangers, but immersed in a deep, deaf loneliness. The wounds of his failed marriage to MÃa Farrow continue to throb, raw. The generation gap has been responsible for the fact that, once again, the man who has sung the most and best about love cannot enjoy it in the first person.
Tears fall on the old scars left by her impossible, but inevitable, passion for Ava Gardner, unstitching them. And possibly he will turn on the spigot of remorse again for the way he abandoned Nancy, the mother of his children.
His condition as a living legend cannot overshadow reality: he is just a man of flesh and blood, a man alone, who can barely understand the world that was once his, that he finds fewer and fewer reasons to sing.
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But the verses and melodies of McKuen, a kind of pop poet of that time, penetrated Frank’s heart, motivating him to create, together with the arranger Don Costa, a brave and emotional work of art. Sinatra sings with the beauty and conviction that he displays in his interpretations of the American Songbook, and it is no exaggeration to say that the title song is among the best works of the Reprise period. Its sad and simple lyrics seem to come from Sinatra’s own broken soul:
“In me you see a man alone
Held by the habit of being on his own
A man who listens to the trembling of the trees
With sentimentals ease
In me you see a man alone
Behind the wall he’s learned to call his home
A man who still goes walking in the rain
Expecting love again
A man not lonely
Except when the dark comes on
A man learning to live with
Memories of midnights
That fell apart at dawn
In me you see a man alone
Drinking up Sundays and spending them alone
A man who knows love is seldom what it seems
Only other people’s dreams
A man learning to live with
Memories of midnights
That fell apart at dawn
In me you see a man alone
Drinking up Sundays and spending them alone
A man who knows love is seldom what it seems
Just other people’s dreams“
Tracklist
“A Man Alone” – 3:47
“Night”– 2:25
“I’ve Been to Town” – 3:13
“From Promise to Promise” – 1:31
“The Single Man” – 3:01
“The Beautiful Strangers” – 2:41
“Lonesome Cities” – 3:18
“Love’s Been Good to Me” – 3:27
“Empty Is”– 2:46
“Out Beyond the Window”– 2:45
“Some Traveling Music”– 2:36
“A Man Alone (Reprise)” – 1:30
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