Near the end of the first act of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (premiered in 1895) the leading man verbalizes that “perfect people don’t need love.” Forty years later, a young Frank Sinatra defiantly took the idea of love and put it on a pedestal. Barely in his early thirties, he was a roll to make romantic love more concrete and believable than virtually any other vocalist of the era. For him, love was the sublime force that ennobles those whom it touches. Even during wartime gloom when love seems anything but idyllic, Sinatra’s songs – whether happy or sad, was always larger than life.

By 1955, Sinatra’s musical talent has matured to a whole new level. He has explored perfection, and was now ready to build the rest of his career on both the bitter and sweet aspects of love. Taking Wilde at his word, he shows how we are all imperfect, and for that very reason, we all need love. From the mid-1950s on, he sang about people who seem like the guy next door, who are gloriously human in their failings, yet never tire of love. Two of Sinatra’s albums: In the Wee Hours (1955) and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers (1956) represent a watershed moment in American music. At the very least, these albums established beyond question the artistic validity of the pop genre. They showed the world exactly what pop music was capable of. Never before had technique, warmth, wit, and especially emotion – from the summit of elation down to the valley of despair – been distilled into such flawless performance. What Citizen Kane did for American cinema and The Great Gatsby did for American literature, In the Wee Hours and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers did for American vernacular music. Prior to 1955, Sinatra only made at most one album a year. But from this point on, he would customarily release two or three LPs annually. His seminal albums would inspire successive generations of mostly by male singers doing passionate love songs with a swinging dance beat, from the likes of Jack Jones, Steve Lawrence, Tony Bennett and more recently, Michael Bublé.

For a trip down the Frank Sinatra memory lane, here’s the spritely “You make me feel so young” from Songs for Swingin’ Lovers (1956). In fact, I recommend listening to the entire album, filled with other gems like “I’ve got you under my skin”, and “Making whoppee”, and “How about you?”