Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958, also known as Sings for Only the Lonely or simply Only the Lonely) is an album by Frank Sinatra. The album consists of a collection of torch songs, following a formula similar to Sinatra's previous albums In the Wee Small Hours (1955) and Where Are You? (1957). According to John Rockwell's book, Sinatra: An American Classic, when asked at a party in the mid-1970s if he had a favorite album among his recordings, without hesitation, Sinatra chose Only the Lonely. The album's front cover was painted by Nicholas Volpe, who won a Grammy Award for the painting. The painting features Sinatra as a sullen, Pagliacci-like clown. Sketched on the album's back cover is one of Sinatra's recurrent visual motifs: a lamppost. Background Sinatra had planned to record the album with arranger Gordon Jenkins, with whom he had worked on Where Are You?. Since Jenkins was unavailable at the time, Sinatra chose to work with his frequent collaborator, Nelson Riddle. The three tracks conducted by Riddle at the would-be first session (May 5, 1958) were not used, and the subsequent May 29 session was conducted by Felix Slatkin, uncredited, after Riddle went on a pre-arranged tour with Nat King Cole. At the time of the recording, Sinatra's divorce from Ava Gardner had been finalized, and Nelson Riddle (who wrote the album's arrangements) had recently suffered the deaths of his mother and daughter. Of these events, Riddle remarked: "If I can attach events like that to music...perhaps Only the Lonely was the result." Mono and Stereo Version Differences Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely was recorded during the time when mass-produced stereo musical recordings were just entering the marketplace. The album was Sinatra's third full-length album to be recorded in both mono and stereo versions, after Where Are You? and Come Fly with Me. According to audio engineer Steve Hoffman, who produced a number of reissues of Capitol Records albums originally recorded in the 1950s, Capitol was during this time continuing to record sessions in mono using their by-then standard microphone placement techniques (including the use of eight separate microphones on the orchestra), and making separate recordings of the session on a 3-track tape recorder using two or three microphones. This method of recording soon gave way to a method where the same set of microphones was used to record sessions to a