“Don’t wait too long,” sang Frank Sinatra sixty years ago when he was struggling with aging and the thought of being over the hill, his end coming. “Why must the moments go by with such haste? Don’t wait too long.”
Much has been written about Frank, and rightly so. These commentaries have been elicited by the universally acknowledged genius of his singing, especially for his gift of soulfully expressing the deepest human emotions of love and loss and longing. I would suggest that Frank Sinatra, and in particular his great album, September of My Years, be requisite listening for anyone interested in real change for the New Year. In the midst of the revelry and fireworks, the old year and the new, the resolutions and irresolutions, looking back and looking forward – here is Sinatra singing of the deepest core of the year’s turning – human loneliness. And how, despite it, to love and connect. How to embrace seeming contradiction. How to change.
I never met Sinatra, but he was my mentor in this process, one that has no ending. It’s transformative work. Ephemeral, yet realer than real. Especially at a time when digital media and AI have scrambled the public’s sense of reality.
When I was young, he taught me to be old. Now that I’m old, he’s taught me to be young. How? By listening to the singing, the words that fly from his mouth come from the heart’s desires, the hunger of the soul. They pierce to the core of all our longings for change within permanence. He didn’t write the words, but he had a genius for articulating them. As Bob Dylan said of Sinatra, “Right from the beginning, he was there with the truth of things in his voice.”
In his voice, yes. I am not speaking of the man about whom so much has been written, good and bad. I am not speaking of his politics or his personal life. I never knew the man, just the voice. That’s enough. From his voice comes truth of a very deep nature.
Listen, you older folks. “When the wind was green at the start of the spring….” “When I was seventeen….” “I know how it feels to have wings on your heels ….”
Youngsters, listen. “When you’re all alone, all the children grown, and like starlings flown away, it gets lonely early, doesn’t it, every single endless day.”
“Once upon a time….” Everyone, listen. Connect.
Perhaps only songs can change us. Arguments so often seem to fall on deaf ears. Could it be that songs are the expression in sound of the dual nature of our New Year’s longings for newness amidst the old?
