Horribly over-praised in its time, 1965’s September is an alpha male prematurely facing a far-off mortality, expressing an overly sentimental melancholy over lost youth. Humbug! Francis Albert may well have been spooked by turning 49, and granted, the average life expectancy 45 years ago was greatly lower. Still, Sinatra remained a vital, dashingly handsome, man’s man rat packer singer-actor-mega star, as evidenced by the continued swooning of the “dolls” at his shows, two decades post-bobby soxers—a year later, he would marry his third wife, 21-year-old Mia Farrow —and more importantly, by his continued relevance as a recording artist instead of mere yesteryear star, as evidenced by 1964’s It Might as Well Be Swing , 1962’s Sinatra-Basie , Sinatra and Swingin’ Brass , and 1961’s I Remember Tommy , Come Swing With Me! , and Swing Along With Me —all of which, as advertised, genuinely swung . (Besides, he hated rock ‘n’ roll, so The Beatles, Beach Boys, and Rolling Stones hardly made him feel anachronistic.) Yes, he’d shown himself the master/innovator of the concept LP, and not every one had featured snappy beats, blaring horns, and his booming insistence that we dance with him; e.g., from 1955’s In the Wee Small Hours to 1962’s Sinatra and Strings . But too much of September returns ol’ blue eyes to the overdramatic mush of too much of his ‘40s recordings for Columbia that had followed his infinitely more exciting work with Harry James ’ and Tommy Dorsey ’s orchestras. For proof, you need only compare his 1946 a-side version of “September Song” to this hardly-different update 19 years later, both utterly lacking the autumnal blues required to pull off the closing romantic declaration with real emotion. September ’s orchestrations are nice, if too melodramatically smooth by half, and his vocals are typically finely rendered. But its nigh impossible to buy into the idea of the singer as a spent force, on his knees before his aging, his best years behind him and filling him with nostalgia, with little left but the reaper’s touch. Even if you didn’t know that this particular vocalist could and would do much better soon (think “The Summer Wind” and the rest of Strangers in the Night and That’s Life , both the next year), or that his actual demise was still 33 years away (!!!); or even if you manage to forget the artist’s biography entirely, there are only two essential, genuinely dramatic encounters here, in the famous “It Was a Very Good Year” and the title track, both highly recommended. Otherwise, too much of this sounds like smaltzy crocodile tears. “Cue the violins, and pass the tissues” for some, is “get with it man!” for others.
