Frank Sinatra hated the songs that made him famous
Frank Sinatra‘s feeling towards his songs was akin to when you say something and the person you’re speaking to doesn’t quite hear you, so you have to say it again, and that scenario plays on a loop until everyone involved is embarrassed and frustrated; it was par for the course for him.
When people go to watch an artist perform live, they always expect the hits, and typically, they expect the biggest hit to come at the end as some finale or impressive encore where the whole crowd can sing along and go home satisfied. It’s in the unwritten contract between a musician and their fans, and so that’s why it feels like such a big deal when certain artists deny it.
When you have acts like Radiohead who passionately shirk the responsibility to play ‘Creep’, fans get annoyed because it feels like something has been ruptured, or that they’ve been denied the thing they paid for. But on the flip side, the monotony of a hit for an artist can end up being a torturous thing: imagine standing there singing the same tune on repeat for decades, and you’d probably want to quit it too, which is how Sinatra felt.
Initially, the one hit torturing him was the ‘My Way’ cover, which was always the grand finale until he finally had had enough and switched to ‘New York, New York’, but he couldn’t bear it settling into the same fate, just with different backing music. In 1983, at an event honouring Elizabeth Taylor, he was walking up to the podium to deliver a speech as the band sprang to life, playing him onto the stage with that iconic 1979 cover, and he just wasn’t happy.
“Don’t ever play that song again! I had enough of ‘My Way,’ which was a pain in the ass, and I don’t want this one to become a pain in the ass!” he yelled at the band.
Sinatra had only just managed to escape the trap of ‘My Way’, and clearly, he was beginning to realise that the song had now been changed, and that it was going to be another track of his that followed him absolutely everywhere. Desperate to protect this hit from becoming another one he was absolutely sick of, he was keen to hear it as little as possible.
But regardless, Sinatra always seemed to wind up hating his top songs, for he felt the same about ‘Strangers In The Night’ too, calling it “a piece of shit”, deeming his own track, “the worst fucking song I’ve ever heard”.
No matter the success the singles brought him, he ended up despising them simply because they were everywhere. Like with any track you listen to on repeat, eventually you’ll grow to hate them, and Sinatra simply suffered that, only with his own songs.
