Six months ago, I began the search for the person who created the iconic cover art for Frank Sinatra’s 1955 concept album “in the wee small hours”. A friend was producing an album, and wanted something similarly evocative for its cover. The cover is a painting, deceptively simple, but able to precisely reflect the mood of a not so simple record. The album’s ballads, Sinatra’s unashamed and heartbreaking message of crippling loneliness, insomnia, lust and regret, is arranged in a devastatingly effective suicidal manner, using a small ensemble of somber woodwinds and celesta. A feeling of scary deep night is carried through with a distant, distracted piano, lazy horns and sleepy bells chiming almost reluctantly across a dreamy sound scape. Sinatra’s lyrical delivery is as if seems he is trying to convince himself of something, a fatal need carrying the weight of intense personal history, transcending his own spirit. The album is a testament to music as an artform, tender resignation at every turn, songs so majestic they might have been sculpted. The accompanying cover art represents a brooding, pensive Sinatra against the backdrop of an eerily deserted night-time streetscape, streetlights receding into the background, awash in the aqua and black hues of suicidal depression. Both album and album cover are annihilating meditations on heartbreak and desolation, the record sustaining its mood for its entire length (Elliot Smith did it later, wrote entire albums to open your veins to, but Sinatra did it first), the painting so exceedingly representative of all this as to seem almost inconceivable.

I don’t know anything about record album art and immediately became frustrated when googling keywords didn’t instantly supply me with the pertinent information, realizing that artists must have been record company slaves, contracted to them and not necessarily credited for their work.  [click to continue…]