Frank’s world

‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.’ Who was Bob Dylan talking about earlier this year? Woody Guthrie? Elvis Presley? Or maybe, halfway through the sixth decade of his own career, himself? But no. The man in question was Frank Sinatra — the inspiration behind Dylan’s latest album, Shadows in the Night.

That record is a collection of covers —from the great American songbook — ‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘The Night We Called it a Day’, ‘What’ll I Do’. We call such songs standards, as if they have been set, if not in stone, then at least on the stave, forever. But that isn’t so. The fact is that when these songs were first performed, 70, 80, 90 years ago, they didn’t sound anything like the moody tone poems right now echoing around your head. They sounded like light opera: all barrel-chested bombast and hammy vibrato trills.