American anthem song writer full#

I don't know that they're going to want to talk about regrets, they've had a few - do you know what I mean? Maybe because men make more mistakes, and they have more to regret,' she jokes, adding that if you're looking for a woman's anthem, try ' These Boots Are Made for Walkin' ' by her big sister Nancy. She and her dad were moving in different directions personally and politically - and while she loves his performance of the song, she's always been so-so on the lyrics, which she says offer an extremely male perspective on the world. 'I think it was a song waiting for him to happen.'Īt the time 'My Way' was made, Tina was returning from school in Europe for the holidays, and had begun to get involved in politics and the women's movement.

That song became his that first night,' she told NPR at her Beverly Hills home. Sinatra's youngest daughter, Tina, remembers very clearly the first time she heard her father perform 'My Way': 'You could feel the energy, electricity, in the room. I'm looking back at all this history, and I'm OK with it.' ' 'Saying, 'Look, I did it the way I wanted to do it, and I did it right.

'You could read 'My Way' as a kind of metaphor for the World War II generation that Frank Sinatra represented,' he says, 'looking back at 20th century history in this kind of cosmic defiance.' King says that essentially, Anka wrote a song not for Francis Albert Sinatra the man, but Frank Sinatra the character, who could stand as a kind of cultural figurehead. Jason King, a professor at NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, says that in writing 'My Way,' Anka used Sinatra as a totem for a certain kind of American bravado.

American anthem song writer full#

Conductor Don Costa completed the equation, arranging 'My Way' for a full orchestra with a big, lush sound. He decided to buy the rights to the song and keep its music, but rewrite the lyrics with his hero in mind. On a visit to France, Anka came across a torch song called ' Comme d'habitude,' performed and co-written by the French pop singer Claude François, that caught his ear. Enter Paul Anka.Īnka was a one-time teen idol, a peer of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, who had grown up in the shadow of singers like Sinatra. His output during that era does include some of his greatest vocal achievements, such as the masterpiece album Strangers in the Night - but hits were unpredictable, and the future of his career seemed far from certain. He was sometimes in the news for the wrong reasons - like when his partnership with the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas reportedly ended in a physical altercation. His ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack years had wound down, as rock and roll became America's dominant music. Like others in his generation, by the late 1960s, Sinatra was feeling the culture slip past him. Among his fans, it is a subject of controversy: Will Friedwald, author of the book Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art, told me it 'would certainly be not on the Top 10 list of anybody who I'd consider a real major Sinatra fan.' So how and why did Frank Sinatra come to sing this song? It turns out that when is even more important. It's not a love song about a girl, a boy or even a city - it's about me, me, me.

Released the following year, ' My Way' was an unusual song for Sinatra.