What’s now is now in Watertown

Just yesterday, my brother introduced me to one of Frank Sinatra’s later and lesser known albums, one that met with mixed reviews from critics and poor sales. Released in 1970, Watertown was one of Sinatra’s last gasps, a concept album that was innovative but perhaps not in the right way at the right time. As this guy perceptibly says, “Watertown comes housed in a sad, dull little brown etching of a desolate hicksville train station, and resembles a no-budget private-pressing or lo-fi folk album more than it does a work by the world’s most successful male vocalist. Brave stuff.” Watertown is poignant because of the point it marked in Sinatra’s career and in his life — no longer a young, glamorous JFK Democrat, Frank was becoming an old, somewhat washed up Nixon/Reagan … Democrat.

And yet, in spite or because of where Sinatra was in celebrity and in life, the album is beautiful and has drawn wonderful write-ups from various corners of the Internet (“If ever I’m asked why I think hipsters are wankers, Watertown is exhibit one…the album Watertown resembles most in this respect is Macarthur Park, Jimmy Webb’s suite of songs for the similarly-limited Richard Harris”).

It tells the story of a man whose wife has left him and their children in Watertown, NY. He laments her loss and recalls her fondly, wistfully, and without ill will. We’re not sure why she left, though there are allusions to an affair and her desire to break from domesticity. Some have suggested that she has in fact died, and that our narrator is experiencing the denial of a truly broken man, waiting in vain for her to return to the Watertown station on a train. Whatever the true intent, it is an album that ought to be rescued from semi-obscurity. So I’ll take a stab right now: