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Song of the Day #1,167: ‘What’s Now is Now’ – Frank Sinatra

On the eighth track of Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, we finally learn the cause of the broken marriage that’s been dissected over the rest of the album — an affair.

Of course, as we learned in When Harry Met Sally, infidelity is a symptom of something else in the marriage that’s wrong (to which Harry retorts, “Well, that symptom is fucking my wife”). In this case, those symptoms are left to our imagination, or hinted at in the margins of the songs preceding this one.

I’ve always wondered if the husband is learning about this affair for the first time after his wife has left, or if he knew about the affair prior to her leaving. The song builds, musically, with the force of revelation, but the question is whether that’s for our sake or his.

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Song of the Day #1,166: ‘What a Funny Girl You Used to Be’ – Frank Sinatra

After opening with the gentle ‘Elizabeth,’ Part Two of Frank Sinatra’s Watertown moves on to the album’s most playful song. Again we are given a glimpse at the woman who is the cause of all this heartbreak, and this time it’s a very sympathetic portrait.

Of course none of the songs on Watertown are particularly upbeat and even this one, despite its amusing lyrics (“you’d fall for lines so easily… whatever they were selling, you’d buy three”) is tinged with sadness and regret.

The way Sinatra sings the single line that makes up the chorus — “What a funny girl you used to be” — captures the loneliness of a man whose happiest memories are a constant source of suffering.

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Song of the Day #1,165: ‘Elizabeth’ – Frank Sinatra

For those just joining us, today begins Week Two of my presentation of Frank Sinatra’s 1970 album Watertown. Last week I covered the five songs that make up Part One of the concept album and this week I’ll examine the five songs in Part Two.

Kicking things off is ‘Elizabeth,’ the first Watertown song about the woman who does the leaving rather than the man who was left behind.

‘Elizabeth’ doesn’t contain any specifics about the storyline of Watertown. It’s a rather straight-forward romantic ballad about a woman shrouded in mystery, “out of reach and out of touch.”

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Song of the Day #1,164: ‘Bleecker Street’ – Simon & Garfunkel

Simon & Garfunkel were nearly finished as soon as they began. The failure of Wednesday Morning, 3AM sent Paul Simon to London and Art Garfunkel to college in New York, their dream of recording together shelved indefinitely.

It would have been a depressing finish for the childhood friends who first performed together in high school (as Tom & Jerry) and had been friends since they were 12 years old.

But the turbulence that marked their first stab at recording as Simon & Garfunkel would become par for the course as their careers progressed.

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Song of the Day #1,163: ‘Sparrow’ – Simon & Garfunkel

It seems appropriate a week after I named Paul Simon as my favorite songwriter to explore his work in more detail. Welcome to Paul Simon Weekends!

Over the next few months, I will explore Simon’s work both with Simon & Garfunkel and as a solo artist. His career has spanned 47 years and 16 studio albums, plus a soundtrack and several live records. Lots of blog fodder there. So let’s dive right in with the 1964 debut of Simon & Garfunkel.

Wednesday Morning, 3 AM is a modest little folk record, released quietly in 1964 and quickly forgotten. It features five Paul Simon originals and seven covers of classic folk songs. The duo cover ‘Peggy-O’ and ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’ as well as a track by one of Simon’s heroes — Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’

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