Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely by Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, his fifteenth studio album, came out on Capitol on September 8, 1958, and it's about as far from finger-snapping swing as the Chairman of the Board could get. Like In the Wee Small Hours and Where Are You? before it, it's a set of torch songs, and Sinatra sings them like a man nursing his last drink long after the band's gone home. Dave Cavanaugh produced it at Capitol Studios.

"One for My Baby and One More for the Road" is the saloon song to end all saloon songs, and the whole record moves at that same slow, heartbroken crawl. Sinatra himself, asked at a party in the mid-'70s to name his favorite of his own albums, picked this one on the spot. Even the sleeve won a Grammy: Nicholas Volpe's painting of Sinatra as a sad-faced clown, with his familiar lamppost sketched on the back. The Grammy Hall of Fame took it in in 1998.

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