"Like Bob Dylan’s, Nina Simone’s, or Mavis Staples’s, Sinatra’s voice is improved by age, by years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels. As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story. Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know about the world, as opposed to what they don’t want to know. While there is a danger in this—the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power—interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused. If, like Frank, you sing it as if you’ll never sing it again.
— Bono, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono” (Knopf, November 1, 2022)