In the Wee Small Hours

Frank Sinatra

Capitol

If you're starting with Sinatra from scratch, it's best to turn to one of the gazillion career-spanning retrospectives on the shelves. If you're graduating to single albums, though, I can't think of a better place to start than the indisputable classic In the Wee Small Hours, a collection of intimate, closing-time ballads, lovingly wrapped in Nelson Riddle's arrangements of a small string section. The emotional and narrative potency of Sinatra's vocals are on ultimate display here.

This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...