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. 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.
Gay Talese wrote a famous profile of Sinatra for Esquire, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," in 1962. 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. 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. Of course, the older, but still larger-than-life singer emerges as the hero, even as he looks like a bully. 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. 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. 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. In addition to lyricist, Lerner was also a playwright and he wrote the book for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. In the 1970 film adaptation, Barbra Streisand sings the song. Hers is a far more bombastic and showy arrangement, starting with a dreamy string swell and working itself into an early lather. The nicotine-voiced Robert Goulet recorded the song in 1965 for On Broadway.
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