 This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream. Head on over to curiositystream.com slash polyphonic to start your free trial today. The album is to music what the novel is to prose, what the feature length movie is to film. It's the definitive medium for this form of artistic expression but it hasn't always been. The album as we know it is a recent invention. There's a lot of moments you can point to as the invention of the album but few cases are as strong as Frank Sinatra's 1955 ode to loneliness in the wee small hours. That album carries with it an emotional depth and cohesion that was rarely seen in its day and its release helped solidify many of the norms that would come to define the way we think of albums today. Let's take a closer look. In the early 1950s Frank Sinatra's career was rebounding from a serious slump. The back half of the 40s saw him lose status as the biggest artist in the world as Sinatra fell to the wrong side of 30 in A Young Man's Game. But he persevered with his art, signing a new deal with Capital Records and teaming up with the conductor Nelson Riddle. Together that pair released two albums in 1954, Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy. The success of these albums launched Sinatra back into stardom. But while his career was finding new life, Sinatra's personal life was in shambles because of a failing relationship with Ava Gardner. That relationship featured affairs on both sides, pregnancy scandal and a constant media spotlight. It was all enough to drive Sinatra into a dark place. So when it came time to put together his third album with Riddle, Sinatra channeled this misery. Now up until this point most pop albums had mostly been collections of singles, new songs alongside jazz standards designed to make their way into jukeboxes or onto the airwaves. And Sinatra was as good as it gets at that. But given his emotional state, he wanted to do something more. He didn't want his next album to be looked at as a collection of some nice songs. Sinatra wanted people to take him seriously as he showed off a painful, vulnerable side of himself. And you couldn't do that with a collection of chart-toppers. You needed something more connected. So Sinatra picked songs that worked around a theme, broken love. He took this collection of songs and placed them temporally too. As the title suggests, it's an album set in the wee small hours of the morning. It's a special time before the sun rises but long after midnight, a time for lonely walks down dead end streets, a time of smoke and alcohol, and a time for reflection on lives and loves past. Frank Sinatra painted a scene around these liminal hours and in doing so he created one of the first concept albums. While the concept is simple, it's unavoidably present in every track. The first song was the only new song on the album, written by David Mann and Bob Hilliard. That duo wrote it during a late night session and it was such a perfect fit for what Sinatra wanted to do with his ninth album that it became the title track. Both lyrically and musically, Sinatra sets the scene for the album with that song. Riddle's arrangements are slow and creeping and Sinatra's voice is deliberate and vulnerable. When it comes to the rest of the album, Nelson Riddle is just as important in creating the mood as Sinatra himself. On the second track, Mood Indigo, he uses subtle string themes and a strained muted trumpet that makes the song feel like walking down a dark wet street. One of the album's highlights is I Get Along Without You Very Well. That hoagie Carmichael song was a hit for Rad Norvo and his orchestra, but Sinatra's version couldn't really be more different than Norvo's. It's important to realize Sinatra's persona when you listen to these songs. Most people saw him as a larger-than-life figure filled with energy and swagger. But this? This was a completely different side of Sinatra. It was a pained human side of a broken man. Listen to the way he sings in Can't We Be Friends. This isn't an immortal man singing. This is a broken man singing his heart out. Some reports even have Sinatra breaking down in tears after recording When Your Lover Has Gone. And that is a heartbreaking song, singing of the way the world loses color, loses meaning when you end a relationship. In The We Small Hours gains momentum as it goes. Riddle arrangements become more pronounced, Sinatra's singing more desperate. In What Is This Thing Called Love, Riddle paints Sinatra's musings with descending runs of strings. Just as the misery builds before the end of a relationship, so does the album. It's a perfect mimicry of a universal human emotion. But Sinatra didn't just stop at the music. When it came time to package and release In The We Small Hours, he wanted something that would match the emotion of the music. Most album artwork at this time was pretty simple. Take a picture of the artist, put a colored background, and put the title in big bold letters. But In The We Small Hours is a painting, something that seems to be pulled from a film noir scene or a hard-boiled detective cover. It uses a blue palette to accentuate the sadness of the songs within, and paints Sinatra as a lonely man in The We Small Hours of the morning. The only part of the album that didn't fit with Sinatra's vision was its original printing. When In The We Small Hours was released, it came out on two 10-inch records. 10 inches were the format for pop music and lighter music, but that's not how Sinatra wanted it to be released. He wanted this record to be taken seriously, so he wanted it to be released in the format that serious music, at the time, classical music, was released on 12-inch records. Eventually, the album's success convinced Capital to release it as Frank wished, a pop album on a 12-inch record. By releasing it like that, Sinatra started a trend that would take over, and soon enough the concept of releasing an album on anything other than 12-inch seemed odd. In form and function, Sinatra created the album as we know it. When you sit down and listen to In The We Small Hours, you're listening to an album that's unapologetically pop but still carries weight to it. It's an artistic work where an icon lays himself bare so that you can experience his work in the way you watch a great film or read a great novel. It's a coherent piece that showed the world a new side of Frank Sinatra and entirely changed the way we listen to pop music. Frank Sinatra is an incredible character in America's musical and cultural history. While researching this video, I kind of became obsessed with him and started to take in anything I could that was related to Sinatra. And while seeking out more knowledge on Sinatra, I found the great documentary Frank Sinatra or America's Golden Age on CuriosityStream. That was a fantastic overview of Sinatra's life, telling of how we went from humble origins to becoming America's first true superstar. And that's just one of a number of great documentaries that CuriosityStream has about music. They've also got a documentary that asks us if a computer could write a hit musical. And of course, it's not just music. CuriosityStream offers 2,000 documentary titles on everything from physics to philosophy, from the past to the future. CuriosityStream is the first subscription streaming service dedicated to helping us on our lifelong quest to learn, explore, and understand. You can try it out for yourself at curiositystream.com slash polyphonic. If you enter the coupon code polyphonic, you'll get 30 days of membership for free and you'll show them that I sent you. After the first month, CuriosityStream is just $2.99 a month. 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