Believe it or not, I still occasionally buy actual music CDs instead of just skimming whatever I want off the web. My tastes in music aren’t exactly the same as those of the teen- and twenty-somethings who dominate the music download world, so sometimes it’s hard to find some of the artists I like among the scads of BitTorrents and other online music sharing. And sometimes I still just like to have the physical CD — owning books, CDs, DVDs and other physical manifestations of content is an artifact of the pre-online life that people my age and older will probably never shake off 100%.
We were at the local Barnes & Noble last weekend engaging in a little impulse retail therapy, mostly oohing and ahhing over some DVD box sets of classic Hollywood musicals, when I picked up the Frank Sinatra album “Only The Lonely” because it was on sale for only $10 with our membership card. The music critic on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” show had mentioned it in his piece about the Grammy Awards as being perhaps Sinatra’s best album, and, though I have a number of Sinatra albums, this one was not part of my collection. Sinatra isn’t hard to find online, but owning Sinatra albums seems like the “right” way to do it.
FWIW, though this is a really beautiful album, “In The Wee Small Hours” is still his best as far as I am concerned.
I did not watch the Grammy Awards that evening, but I did see a brief clip of the duet between Alicia Keyes and Ol’ Blue Eyes as the opening number, a la “Unforgettable” years ago with Natalie and Nat King Cole. They used previously unseen footage of Sinatra singing “Learnin’ The Blues”, while Keyes played piano and sang live on stage. “Only The Lonely” was one of the albums nominated for Album Of The Year the very first year the Grammys were awarded, and this year marks the 50th anniversary of both.
Though Frank Sinatra never really goes out of style, his legend does wax and wane from time to time. We’ve been in a bit of a lull Sinatra-wise for the last several years, but it looks like he’s ready to take a swing at it again. Here’s your chance to bone up on some key Rat Pack-style lingo so you won’t be left out in the cold when Frankie’s hot again.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
Another thing we agree on. Scary!