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Sinatra Song of the Week: Cycles

"There isn't much that I have learned/Through all my foolish years/Except that life keeps runnin' in cycles/First there's laughter, then those tears ..."

One of the more critically maligned Sinatra albums of the sixties, "Cycles" was a collection of "timely" pop songs intended to find The Chairman some relevance in a quickly changing music landscape. Unfortunately, the result yeilded songs which may have been the nadir of the Sinatra songbook, including such ill-advised covers as "Little Green Apples" and "By The Time I Get To Phoenix". Among the ruins, however, is a song that I've grown increasingly fond of--the title cut. "Cycles", the song, gets very little credit from the more serious Sinatra biographers. Will Friedwald, in his definitive work "Sinatra: The Song Is You" has very little to say about it other than it is very unlikely that FAS would have actually used the phrase "my gal just up and left last week". What I find most significant about the song is the glimpse it provides at what Sinatra would have sounded like had he attempted to perform serious country music.

Unlike his Rat Pack brother, Dean Martin, Sinatra steered clear of country music for most of his career.  With the exception of the song "Cycles", the closest he really got to embracing the genre was a forgettable concert double bill with John Denver--not exactly the definitive artist of the genre. Since I am a fan of traditional country music, I've wondered what Sinatra would have sounded like paired with some of the giants of the genre such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle Haggard, etc. With his vocal performance on "Cycles" it is pretty clear that with the right partner and the right material it could have been as sublime a pairing as his brilliant work with Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Lyrically, the song revists some familiar themes: life is rough, but it's better than the alternative. Or, as Sinatra himself noted "You better love livin' baby cause dyin' is a pain in the ass". The lyrics work until the last verse, which, as Friedwald notes, fits Sinatra like a thrift store suit: "My gal just up and left last week; Friday I got fired." It's almost laughable to think of the circa 1960's Sinatra "getting fired", and if a gal did leave him he would have sure been able to sing about it more eloquently. It's not like he hadn't personally redefined the "gal that got away" genre--both personally and professionally.

The song also suffers from some gruesome instrumentation in the Don Costa arrangement. The lush strings typical of Costa's work are painfully out of place, and the juxtaposition with a rinky dink piano right out of a mid-70's Shakey's Pizza Parlor borders on the absurd. Not surprisingly, the vocal saves the song--Sinatra has an almost instinctive sensitivity toward the material as he softly sings the words. It's as if he's determined to give the problematic lyric credibility, even if he has to do it all by himself.

A facet of Sinatra's talent that doesn't get the credit it deserves is his ability to use his vocal instrument to accompany material, as opposed to it being the featured element of the music. This was perhaps most evident in his brilliant work with Jobim, but on this song there is a glimpse of how effective Sinatra could have been in the country music genre. It's a shame that he didn't give this a shot--instead of singing second rate pop songs and working with hacks like John Denver, it would have been great to have heard such masters as Johnny Cash or George Jones with Sinatra. Unfortunately, that never happened but on "Cycles" we can envision, at least somewhat, how it might have been.

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