![song on a clear day song on a clear day](https://windows10spotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/4b96724dd54f46eb6822b8e245e94b78.jpg)
The nicotine-voiced Robert Goulet recorded the song in 1965 for On Broadway. Hers is a far more bombastic and showy arrangement, starting with a dreamy string swell and working itself into an early lather. In the 1970 film adaptation, Barbra Streisand sings the song. In addition to lyricist, Lerner was also a playwright and he wrote the book for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Lane, the song's composer, was an esteemed Broadway and Tin Pan Alley songwriter who collaborated with such legends as Ira Gershwin and Frank Loesser, as well as Lerner. The recording might swing easily, but the moments of quiet and confident intensity are set aside for moments of sock-it-to-me punch combinations. As Talese summarizes, "And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life - as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra." It is this kind of intense and unflagging authority that is heard on "On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)." If anything, the wizened singer has only gotten more commanding as he has aged. Of course, the older, but still larger-than-life singer emerges as the hero, even as he looks like a bully. At one point, this conflict comes to life as Sinatra has some sort of showdown with a younger hipster, Harlan Ellison, then a screen writer and soon-to-be-famous author. It examines the singer at a crossroads in his career and life, a giant star faced with the 50-year mark and yet another round of pop-music upstarts on his heels. Gay Talese wrote a famous profile of Sinatra for Esquire, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," in 1962. Everything in this arrangement works, slipping in in just the right slot - the piano figures in between the horn bleats, for example - and the band plays so far behind the beat that it is downright funky. Just as the singer wraps up the first go-round of the song (at about the two-minute mark), Riddle gives the arrangement a little breath before hitting us in the gut with one of the most stirring horn-section breaks. Listen to the power in the man's voice rising up over the soaring horns, strings, organ, and rhythm section - all barely contained in an impossibly restrained tempo. Nelson Riddle provides the horn-driven Sinatra version for the singer's 1966 Strangers in the Night LP and it is doubtful if any garage-rocking mop tops came anywhere close to rocking as hard as Sinatra's recording does. The Alan Jay Lerner/Burton Lane-penned "On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)" comes from the 1963 Broadway musical of the same name. Verse On a clear day, rise and look around you And you'll see who - just who you are On a clear day, how it will astound you That the glow of your being outshines every star You feel part of.
#Song on a clear day full#
Frank Sinatra roared back with one of his most swinging tunes just as the British Invasion was hitting full stride and taking over the airwaves.