Thursday, February 18, 2010

The February of Frank: Sinatra's Solo Duets


After yesterday's re-post of Sinatra's Duets, I thought it would be cool to do a feature on the Duets album from 1993. For those of you who don't know, this album was the last big firework in the Chairman's display. And what a firework it was! It was advertised as “The Recording Event of The Decade.” It features duets between Sinatra and other guest star singers from various genres; Sinatra personally chose the performers. Some of the performers appearing on the album were Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, Barbara Streisand, Bono, Anita Baker, Carly Simon, Tony Bennett and Gloria Estefan. The only problem in this whole "duets" album was that the songs were not originally recorded that way. In fact, the songs were recorded in their entirety by Frank first. After the songs were already recorded, that's when the "duet" partners came in and did their part. The actual "duets" were just the guest artists singing along to a pre-recorded track. Think of singing along to your favorite song and taping it on a tape recorder and you get the gist. It was because of the way this album was recorded that my father actually boycotted it. He felt that it was a sham. Sham or not, the album was a commercial success, selling over 3 million copies in the U.S and reaching #2 on the Billboard albums chart. Here for you now is not the completed Duets album but rather the recordings made by Frank before the "duet" partners were added. Here is "Frank Sinatra's Duets: Solo". Enjoy!

Frank Sinatra-Duets:Solo

BONUS:
Here's the video for "I've Got You Under My Skin" that was a duet with Bono. They made no bones to cover up how they recorded the album by emphasizing it with the way they produced the video!

1 comment:

trevgibbonfilmandmusic said...

I would love to be able to hear the solo duets album without the other vocalists parts on. I have not been able to find reference to it anywhere other than your splendid page. Any possibility of a re-upload? Thanks again. Trev

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