Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [307]
The lengthy obscurity of one of Sinatra’s greatest recordings is something of a mystery. He had recorded the song, with an Axel Stordahl arrangement, on his first Capitol recording date the previous April. But the Stordahl version was problematic. On the one hand, there was Frank’s vocal, which was sensational: tender, strong, and ardent. On the other, Axel’s arrangement, to put a fine point on it, was corny, old-fashioned, and soporific, from the chimes-of-midnight pizzicato intro to the soupy wash of strings and harp glissandi that seem to want to recast this towering love song as the theme to a B movie. Alan Livingston’s sharp young ears would have heard every bit of this, making his quest to link Sinatra and Riddle all the more urgent.
More important, though, Frank was eager to get the song right.
So he and Riddle made this magnificent recording, which languished in the Capitol vault for decades—in all likelihood, as the archivist Ed O’Brien has suggested, because Frank’s concepts for each of his albums were so specific that there was simply no place to put “Day In, Day Out” until it resurfaced as an asterisk in the singer’s seventy-sixth year. It was an astounding omission, but we are the beneficiaries of the correction, able to hear singer and arranger already at the apex of their powers. In the thirty-two-year-old Riddle’s hands, “Day In, Day Out” became a hymn to passion, unashamedly romantic and forthrightly sexual. It is real drama rather than melodrama. And the arrangement’s richness is greatly enhanced by the presence of a seventeen-piece string section, as contrasted to a mere nine for the Stordahl session.
In Riddle’s hands, the fiddles pulse in waves, lilting and halting, with all the teasing hesitancy and onward rush of first love; his flutes and harps are shimmering moon glow rather than schmaltz. The great Mercer lyric, at first all daydreams and possibility, rises to a peak of ardor when the lovers meet and kiss (“an ocean’s roar, a thousand drums”), and this is when Riddle finally brings on all the horns and timpani … but that’s not the end. The music and the singing grow gentle again—
Can there be any doubt
When there it is, day in—day out
—before fading to a close. Riddle would later describe his methodology. “In working out arrangements for Frank,” he said,
I suppose I stuck to two main rules. First, find the peak of the song and build the whole arrangement to that peak, pacing it as he paces himself vocally. Second, when he’s moving, get the hell out of the way. When he’s doing nothing, move in fast and establish something. After all, what arranger in the world would try to fight against Sinatra’s voice? Give the singer room to breathe. When the singer rests, then there’s a chance to write a fill that might be heard.
Most of our best numbers were in what I call the tempo of the heartbeat. That’s the tempo that strikes people easiest because, without their knowing it, they are moving to that pace all their waking hours. Music to me is sex—it’s all tied up somehow, and the rhythm of sex is the heartbeat. I usually try to avoid scoring a song with a climax at the end. Better to build about two-thirds of the way through, and then fade to a surprise ending. More subtle. I don’t really like to finish by blowing and beating in top gear.
This is precisely the methodology of “Day In, Day Out.” The heartbeat trips and quickens toward the climax, then eases back to a serene afterglow.
Sinatra was crazy about this arrangement, and his singing shows it. Here he is not only ardent and tender, as he was on the Stordahl record, but passionate. His emotional and sexual engagement with every syllable of the lyric, every note of the song, every bar of the arrangement,