This is a mood album based on the combination of two concepts: the intimacy of the Tony Bennett/Bill Evans collaborations and the aching sadness of Frank Sinatra's concept albums "In the Wee Small Hours" & "Only the Lonely." If you liked those previously mentioned artists/albums, be sure to check this out. There are no horn players, organists or drummers on An Intimate Portrait in Blue; Lanza's only accompaniment on that album is Philly pianist Jason Long. Because Long is such a lyrical and melodic player, he was perfect for an album as introspective as An Intimate Portrait In Blue. If one notices that Lanza's voice sounds a bit rougher than usual on An Intimate Portrait in Blue, it is because he was battling a cold when he recorded the album in 1998. And as Lanza sees it, that cold turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The singer explains: "An Intimate Portrait In Blue isn't meant to be the work of a high school student who got his heart broken for the first time. It's coming from the perspective of a man who has been a loser in the game of love, and someone like that is going to have a rougher edge to his voice." Having a cold was the least of Lanza's problems when he recorded An Intimate Portrait in Blue. At the time, he was involved in a troubled marriage that only went from bad to worse--one that eventually ended in Lanza filing for divorce. “At the time," Lanza recalls, "I was suffering from a great deal of abuse in a relationship--physical, mental and emotional. So I'm sure that something in my subconscious drove me to record that type of album. I think that the things I was going through are why the album came out as well as it did. Jason was also going through some things in his personal life at the time." Lanza's marriage finally came to a troubled end in 2001, a year he will remember as the most difficult year of his life. It was also in 2001 that Lanza's mother, the late classical pianist/organist Joan Trombetta-Lanza, suffered a massive stroke. Trombetta-Lanza had been in a coma for several days when members of the Lanza family realized that there was no chance of recovery and agreed to remove her from life support. For Lanza, losing his mother and realizing that his marriage was doomed was a double whammy. "The relationship I was in when I recorded An Intimate Portrait in Blue in 1998 didn't end in 1998, although it probably should have ended long before that. The end of that relationship was one of the most difficult things that I've ever had to go through - coupled with the death of my mother on October 12, 2001 and the destruction of my childhood home by a fire in August 2002."