A word of warning is in order for anyone who bought Sinatra on Capitol's "Nice Price" vinyl series in the '80s. As it did with the Beach Boys' offerings in the same series, Capitol deleted up to four cuts per album. The CD reissues restore the whole album and often add bonus tracks. For vinyl junkies, EMI reissued the albums intact in England in the '80s. All 21 of them traveled back with me from one particular trip to London. Essential? Sure. Along with the Beatles and Dylan's '60s work, Sinatra's Capitol albums represent the greatest sustained achievement of any pop recording artist.

Over the 15 tracks of "Songs for Swingin' Lovers," Sinatra sings sad songs and happy ones, but with the exception of "We'll Be Together Again," even the sad songs don't stay sad for very long. Part of the credit goes to Nelson Riddle's flawless arrangements: Horns provide brightness and punch without ever becoming overbearing, strings are used sparingly and kept in the background, never acquiring even a hint of schmaltz.

"It Happened in Monterey" can sum up the album's approach. Sinatra is singing of how he lost a woman in Mexico "and gave away the key to paradise." Riddle's arrangement prods him out of his reverie. The brass comes to the fore and damned if Sinatra, broken heart and all, doesn't start swinging, breaking up the lyrics into something resembling percussion: "Stars/ Steel guitars/ Lips as red as wine/ Broke/ Somebody's heart/ And I fear/ That it was mine."

It's a pattern he also follows on "Too Marvelous for Words," where he turns a vocabulary list -- "Glorious/ Glamorous/ And that old standby amorous" -- into a hipster's lexicon.

Sinatra takes songs that other artists have proffered like tattered valentines and turns them into irresistible invitations, as if he were approaching some lovely to cut loose on the dance floor. If you've heard Maurice Chevalier's oozy Gallicisms on "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me" -- "Eef ah nahtengale, coul' seeng lak yooo" (or even if you've just heard the Marx Brothers imitating Chevalier in "Monkey Business"), what Sinatra does is damn near flabbergasting. It's not just the switched lyrics ("I'm hip that I'm the slave"), it's the charming cockiness within the phrasing.

With a muted horn providing just the right accentuation, Sinatra, in a light, higher-than-usual register, swings the melody. The downward trajectories of some lines ("They'd sing much sweeter than they do") almost take on the quality of a sly punch line. And yet, dreamy and wised-up, the performance is never less than romantic. Sinatra sings it as a courtier dressed in fedora, cufflinks and loosened tie.

Throughout the album, there are examples of those tinkered-with lyrics. On "Makin' Whoopee," Sinatra sings "A lot of shoes/ A gang of rice." (A gang of rice?) And when the album swings, as on "That Old Devil Moon," it swings hard. Like a jazzman reaching for a joint, "I've Got You Under My Skin" is so blithe in its conflation of love and addiction that the cool effrontery of it can slide right by you.

But for me, the album's masterpiece is "I Thought About You." A little-known song by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Mercer, it's the sort of standard you might expect from Edward Hopper had he been a songwriter instead of a painter. The singer, separated from the woman he loves, is on a night train, peeking out the shade at the moonlit little towns that slide by his window. Each sight, recounted in language as spare as a line drawing, nonetheless takes on the richness of a painted canvas. It's the ordinary transformed into a nighttime dreamscape, lighting a low steady flame in the singer who longs to belong somewhere -- in the arms of the woman he is leaving behind, or in one of the houses whose lit windows he can see from the train. It's Sinatra's version of the ineffable passage near the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," where the narrator, Nick Carraway, recounts his college Christmas trips home to the Midwest:

"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again."

That's a perfect description for how Sinatra turned the persona of the romantic loner into an American ideal. Who wouldn't welcome heartbreak if it allowed these elegant and exquisite flights of feeling? Elsewhere on "Songs for Swingin' Lovers!" Sinatra is his own Gatsby, the ordinary American kid who entered a self-created world of luxury and style and wealth. But Gatsby without the longing, with the spring still in his step and the swing never far from his voice.