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At the time these 12 songs were recorded, Francis Albert Sinatra was in his mid-to-late twenties. Over the next five decades, he would establish himself not only as an astonishingly talented and successful singer, but as one of the prime exemplars of 20 th-century American popular music. Listening to this CD, you can clearly identify the Chairman-to-be’s stylistic debt to crooners like Bing Crosby. And yet there’s something else at work here, an intensity that’s all the more affecting for being so casual. Few singers have captured the trembling essence of romance the way he does here. — Mac Randall