Seth MacFarlane: A Long Talk About Finding Frank Sinatra’s Lost Arrangements

And yet, all of these themes and all of these musical phrases were instantly recognizable to me. I’m like, “I remember that!” We just took it for granted. As synthesized music became more easy to produce, that went away. Very rarely, even on big-budget television shows for adult audiences, do you hear that anymore. The biggest HBO show with the biggest production budget sometimes will have a synth score. For me there’s a little bit of a responsibility to include live orchestral music wherever I can in these shows. And I think, certainly for something like Family Guy, having heard it both ways, you can’t do a 3-minute musical number without a live orchestra. You just can’t. The audience may not know why they’re getting bored, or why they’re getting antsy, or why they’re not stirred at all, and that’s one of the reasons.

It’s rare for anything in a contemporary space to have so many bodies—so many players—in the same room together like they are on Lush Life. How does this record compositionally compare to what you’ve done before? These songs—they’re pop standards, really—were composed by Nelson Riddle, Billy May, and Don Costa. What was the challenge for you when it came to stepping into them and embodying and honoring what they are?

It was twofold. Thank God I did this record now, instead of ten, fifteen years ago, because I really wouldn’t have known what to do with it. I hadn’t acquired the experience or the knowledge that I’ve learned from all of these musicians over the years that I’ve worked with, and certainly from Joel McNeely. But it was trying to figure out how to keep enough of myself and the tone and style that I had established over the eight or so albums that I had released over the past fifteen years present, and, at the same time, recognizing that this is music that was written for a particular instance, for a particular performer, by arrangers who had their own styles. Musically, a lot of it was looking for clues in a Billy May chart. He uses these wet-sounding sax lines; you hear it a lot on his arrangements. We would use that as an anchor, to figure out how fast or slow he might have wanted this chart to have been played. Sometimes, the dynamics on these score sheets literally say “uptempo,” which could mean 80 million different things, right? It’s up to you to figure it out.

And, with all these guys having passed away, it’s a lot of guesswork. You have to piece together what you know of their individual styles and cross-index it with what’s on these scores, that no one has ever played, and try to read their minds, basically. The same was true with Sinatra. Vocally, I was really trying to honor what it was that he would have wanted to hear, because he was so particular about his orchestrations. At the same time, I was making sure that it didn’t feel like a Vegas cover show, or that I was just doing an impression. It was this Goldilocks zone that I had to exist in, musically. Hopefully we pulled it off.

Knowing that a couple of these songs were meant to be on some of Sinatra’s more iconic work, like Only the Lonely or Come Fly With Me, how valuable was that for you get to put a little love, maybe a little bit of yourself into the “rejects,” so to speak, of these legendary albums?

The nice thing to discover, when we went through these tracks, is that these things weren’t kicked away from the final cut of the albums because they weren’t good enough. That was our fear, that we were going to be running across things that were very clearly could have been subpar. And, in some cases, that was true, but there were a lot of charts that were just astonishingly great. You wonder why they weren’t included on these records. The chart for “How Did She Look?,” which was originally considered for Only the Lonely, is a chart that’s superior to some of the orchestrations that did make the cut. I think Sinatra singing that song would have been a legendary recording, by all means. To find that you have that kind of a treasure trove, and that these were songs that really should have been recorded by him, was really a gift. It was nice to see that what was left behind wasn’t actually a pile of rejects. They were, in many cases, songs we wish had been recorded by him.

We’re seeing artists like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, and now Bruce Springsteen, emptying their vaults and sharing hidden or forgotten material that have been tucked away for decades. What should people know about Sinatra’s vastness—considering that he made and released so much music while he was alive, let alone the work that didn’t end up seeing a release until these Lush Life arrangements?

Ideally, what they learn about his vastness is the same thing that I learned in college: The songs we know him for—“It Was a Very Good Year,” “My Way,” “New York, New York”—are far from his greatest recordings. And I know that’s a very musically snobbish thing to say, like, “You haven’t listened to the Beatles unless you listen to [The Quarrymen]”—the music snob who insists that only the obscurities are worthwhile, which is certainly not the case with Sinatra. Some of his recordings that are well-known are well-known for a reason, because they’re just great recordings. But there are other songs—I mean, he never liked “My Way,” as the story goes. He didn’t love singing it—and you listen to a song like “What’s New?,” which is one of his great recordings on Only the Lonely, and you can hear that he’s putting something into that he just isn’t really necessarily drawing from in other cases. You can tell when he’s really feeling the art of it and when he’s feeling the commercialization of it.

At what point were you starting to discover these arrangements? I know you started working with Sinatra’s estate after Frank Jr. passed.

I had heard the “Lush Life” recording, which is the most famous unfinished Sinatra recording of all, because he actually did get through half of it. And I think it’s, to my knowledge, the only unrecorded Sinatra song for which there does exist a partial recording at that level. I worked with Frank Jr. on Family Guy for two or three episodes, and he was just a trove of arcane musical knowledge. He would come in and introduce me to some old orchestras that I had never heard of. When he passed away, Tina Sinatra reached out and asked if we’d be interested in acquiring this library. And that was when I really became aware, from their archivist and from Sinatra Enterprises, of what was in here and what was possibly in here. These were something like 1,200 boxes of charts. Obviously, a lot of them are the existing charts that we know and love, from all the great recordings that were archived there, but also all of these songs that had not been recorded—in some cases, not just arrangements but entire songs.

A song like “Come Fly With Me” was written for the album Come Fly With Me, but most of his songs were older songs that he repurposed and made his own. That was his gift. So much of the Sinatra library in general are songs from twenties, thirties, and forties that he then just reinvented. You almost forget that they ever existed before Sinatra recorded them. So, finding entire songs—melodies that had been buried for seven decades—and playing those for the first time, in an era where people don’t write that kind of stuff anymore… But, also, I think that they can’t. I’ve worked with other composers who I respect, who are fantastic and as good as it gets, but it’s just something about breathing that air back then and being surrounded by all these other songwriters that were writing this kind of stuff and one-upping each other. If you’re a Beatles fan, trying to write something that evokes that style, you just can’t do it. It’s a product of its time, and it’s a product of who they were at that time in the world that they lived in that begat that music.

It really is something precious, to run across a brand new tune that would be impossible to write today. Her offering us those charts was a really major deal, and I will be forever grateful for her. But it was surprising. It wasn’t something that I was expecting. I had worked with Frank Jr. for a good number of years prior to that, and I didn’t really even know that this library existed. The three days that I remember most vividly were when we grabbed as many of these charts as we could out of those boxes, went over to the Fox Studio Lot, to their orchestral stage, hired an orchestra, and just started playing this stuff, not really knowing what it was until you heard it. You can look at the score sheets and get a sense, but you don’t really know what you have until those musicians start playing. That was a pretty amazing experience.

When it comes to craft, be it the craft of the charts or the craft of your interpretations of them, what do these songs best exhibit about that, by your approximation?

It’s really the art of the arrangement. It’s the art of orchestration, which, in many ways, is kind of lost for a number of reasons—one being for the same reason that melodic writing is lost: It just is of another time and of another world. It’s also just not necessary, in many ways, for the kind of music that we produce today. What always astounds me is that, if you pull Sinatra’s vocal out of the recording and you listen to just what’s going on with the orchestra, it’s amazingly intricate and amazingly detailed. And, in some cases, it sounds like you’re listening to a fucking symphony. On some of these ballads, it’s just amazing.

Probably the simplest litmus test that you can do is, if you go to a karaoke bar and listen to the “orchestration” or arrangement from your pick of pop songs today—to take nothing away from that music, it’s a different style—it’s comparatively simple. There’s a simplicity to it and a steadiness to it that doesn’t really deviate from itself a whole lot. Listening to something like “Spring is Here,” there’s an insane amount going on in that orchestra, even without Sinatra.

Craft-wise, it’s about 75-percent of the reason that I do this. I love orchestras. My favorite part of working on a film or working on a TV show is going to that soundstage and hearing the orchestra play, because it’s the one part of the process that I really have nothing to do with. A lot of times, I just get to go and listen. It’s the part that still has some mystique for me. Every other part of the filmmaking process, I now know the ingredients of the soup. I know how they’re doing it—and it’s helpful, because I have to, oftentimes, do it myself—but it takes away some of the excitement that I used to feel, going to the movies and having no idea how they’re doing these things. The one thing that still has that feeling of mystery is the musical process. When I give my composer a finished episode of a show or a finished film, and they come back, if it’s a film, eight weeks later with a full score that is just so astonishing and so intricate, and I hear the orchestra play it, I don’t really know how they’re doing it. And I certainly don’t know how they’re doing it that quickly. That part of the craft is still the most affecting for me. Again, some of this is because of ignorance—I’m able to preserve some of what I loved about making music and TV shows that’s now gone, because I do know how it all works.

You wrote some new lyrics for one of these songs, too, because they were originally in Italian, right?

That was for “Arrivederci, Roma,” which is a song that I was familiar with already. I didn’t know it had a verse leading up to the main body of the song, and there was a verse in the chart and it was all in Italian. I don’t speak Italian, and I don’t know that anyone wants to hear me try to speak Italian. But, more importantly, we tried to imagine how Sinatra would have handled it. Dean Martin sang in Italian a lot of the time. Nat King Cole sang in Spanish, he was multilingual. I don’t ever remember Sinatra singing in Italian or in any other language. He kept it to English, pretty much, so it seemed like, if he had sung this song, he probably would have sung it in English. But there were no English lyrics, so we had it translated word for word. Obviously, all you get there is the content, the thoughts being expressed. Nothing rhymes and, structurally, it’s all different, because it’s making the journey from Italian to English.

After, of all things, years of writing songs for Family Guy and pushing myself, lyrically, to be honest and not lean on the “near rhymes” any more than I had to, it was a skill that I had honed enough to be able to pull it off. It was a challenge, and it was a fun challenge, because it has to blend with this refrain that comes afterward and is beautifully written and has been around for decades. The whole idea was to make it invisible, to make people think that this was just a lyric that had always existed and we had just uncovered it.

I remember being thirteen years old and seeing the cover of Music Is Better Than Words for the first time. It was huge for me. I bought Chet Baker Sings on vinyl because it reminded me of that. When I was in high school, you were showing people my age how cool it was to sing standards by Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Lerner and Loewe. I don’t think I understood why that meant something back then, not until I went to and graduated from college. We had no idea back then. But so much of that style that you’d cultivated for yourself, and have been tending to since, was so often in response to Sinatra’s inventions and what groundwork he laid for vocalists seventy years ago. Between that first record of yours and Lush Life now, what’s your favorite thing that’s changed about your musicality?

I had the same experience when I was a kid too, because my parents introduced me to all of these old films and musicals—things that I was receptive to but didn’t really appreciate until I was in college and started to understand what it was that I had been hearing. More than anything, it’s an understanding of casting musicians, which is something I had really no clue about. Today, I at least have this skill of, like, “Okay, if we need a guitarist for this type of recording, is it Larry Koonse? Is it Graham Dechter? We need a drummer. We have Peter Erskine, we have Ryan Shaw. We need a woodwind player. Is it Dan Higgins? Is it Brian Scanlon?” These are names that I wasn’t really aware of fifteen years ago. I mean, I was aware of them, but I hadn’t dug in deep and hadn’t really gotten the education of each individual player and what their skill set is. It really is like casting an actor. It’s right down to the song. If you’re doing this kind of song, you probably want this trombonist.

It’s the art of orchestration. I was able to really learn about what it is that comprises the gears of this machinery, and why an orchestra sounds the way it does playing a particular piece of music, and why it is that old recordings sound the way they do, and why they have that warmth that’s so often hard to duplicate. If you hear somebody making a big band recording today, there’s a weird antiseptic quality to it. You can tell, instantly, that it was made today. There are a lot of little elements that we learned over the years that, by the time we got to Lush Life, we were able to use to make sure that this sounded as authentic as it could.

And that’s down to how you record it. Rather than recording digitally, we used reel-to-reel tape. They would haul these old reel-to-reel recorders out of the basement of Capitol Records or Abbey Road, wipe off the dust, and record it. That little hiss that you hear is actually part of it. It’s how you mic the band; how much vibrato the string players and woodwind players use when they’re recording; and, above all, it’s making the time to rehearse with the band. Even on film scores back in the forties, fifties, and sixties, you had all these contract orchestras that were just there every day. If you were a part of the Warner Brothers or MGM orchestras, you were sitting next to the same person every single day for years. So, what you had was an ensemble that could sometimes be ninety players that would have the tightness of nine, like a small jazz combo. Achieving that kind of sound is something that, in tiny increments, I learned over the course of the past fifteen years. And that’s why I’m very happy that this opportunity didn’t come about when Music Is Better Than Words came out, because I don’t think it would have been anywhere near as good.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.