Trilogy
At age 64, Sinatra recorded this three-LP (now two-CD) epic, a grandiloquent statement which attempted to sum up his career, as well as pay tribute to his status as America's greatest living singer. The result is at turns sublime, awful, and just plain bizarre; "Reflections on the Future in Three Tenses," Gordon Jenkins's bombastic suite that covers the last third of the set, almost gets over on camp value alone. Covers of such contemporary hits as Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" and Neil Diamond's "Song Sung Blue" don't really work, but "The Theme fromNew York, New York" is classic Sinatra all the way. If the Chairman of the Board never made another record, this would at least have made for a suitably larger-than-life exit.--Dan Epstein