Fly Me to the Moon

The Hook: A Love Song That Hitched a Ride on a Rocket

Here is the strange thing about "Fly Me to the Moon": for the first nine years of its life, that was not even its name.

The song was written in 1954 by a nightclub pianist named Bart Howard, and he called it "In Other Words." That title tells you exactly what the song is really doing. The whole lyric is a man fumbling for language. He reaches for the moon, for the stars, for spring on Jupiter and Mars, and then, almost sheepishly, he stops and admits that all of those enormous cosmic images are just a roundabout way of saying something very small and very ordinary: hold my hand, I love you. The grandeur is a decoy. The payoff is three plain words.

Audiences, however, kept asking for "that fly-me-to-the-moon song," and by 1963 the publisher reportedly gave in and officially renamed it. One year later Frank Sinatra walked into a Los Angeles studio with the Count Basie Orchestra and a young arranger named Quincy Jones, and the delicate waltz became a finger-snapping swing number. Five years after that, a cassette of Sinatra's version was spinning in the Apollo 10 command module as it circled the Moon, and it is widely reported that Buzz Aldrin played it again on the lunar surface during Apollo 11.

So a love song about not having the right words became the unofficial soundtrack of humanity's largest technical achievement. That accident is the entire story of this song.

Background: Bart Howard, the Blue Angel, and a Song That Took Twenty Minutes

Bart Howard was born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1915, and by the early 1950s he was the house pianist and master of ceremonies at the Blue Angel, a sophisticated supper club on New York's East 55th Street. The Blue Angel was the kind of room where Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte and Eartha Kitt got their early breaks, and where the audience expected wit, polish and a little melancholy with their martinis. Howard wrote songs for the singers who passed through, and he later said that "In Other Words" took him roughly twenty minutes to write, though he liked to add that it took him twenty years of writing to be able to write it that fast.

The first singer to perform it was Felicia Sanders, who sang at the Blue Angel in 1954. The first recording came from Kaye Ballard the same year. Over the next decade the song became a quiet standard among cabaret and jazz singers: Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Eydie Gormé and Peggy Lee all took it on. Peggy Lee's 1960 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in front of tens of millions of American viewers, is often credited with lifting it from insider favourite to national property, and it is said that Lee herself was among those urging Howard to make the popular nickname the official title.

Then came the key musical pivot. In 1962, pianist Joe Harnell recorded a bossa nova instrumental version in 4/4 time rather than Howard's original gentle 3/4 waltz. It reached the Billboard Top 20 and won a Grammy. The song now had a groove, and a groove is something Frank Sinatra could do something with.

Sinatra in 1964 was in an interesting position. He was 48, he had left Capitol Records to found his own label, Reprise, and he was watching Beatlemania sweep both the United States and his own daughter's generation. On the one hand, he was the most powerful popular singer in the world. On the other, he was the establishment, and the ground was moving. His response was not to chase the kids but to double down on what he did better than anyone: swing with the best big band alive. He had already recorded one album with Count Basie in 1962. For the follow-up, "It Might as Well Be Swing," he hired Quincy Jones, then just 31, to arrange and conduct.

The sessions took place in Los Angeles in June 1964. Jones later described how he reworked Howard's waltz into a loping, mid-tempo swing chart, opening with a cool flute figure over the Basie rhythm section before the brass comes crashing in. Sinatra, who famously liked to record live with the band in the room, sings the whole thing in what sounds like one unbroken, relaxed take. The recording was never released as a single in the United States at the time. It did not need to be. It became one of the most played tracks of his career anyway.

For British readers there is a small irony here. In the same months Sinatra was cutting this album, the Beatles were on their first American tour, and the American press was framing the moment as a changing of the guard, Liverpool replacing Hoboken. Sinatra was not impressed, and reportedly said so in colourful terms. Yet within five years he would be recording George Harrison's "Something" and calling it one of the finest love songs of the past half-century. "Fly Me to the Moon," meanwhile, quietly outlasted the argument: it is one of the few pre-rock standards that both generations' grandchildren still know word for word.

Core Meaning: Big Sky, Small Request

Strip away the brass and the swagger and the lyric is almost comically modest.

The singer opens by asking to be taken somewhere impossibly far away, up among the stars, so he can see what the seasons look like on other planets. Then, mid-sentence, he changes register entirely. What he actually means by all this, he says, is simply that he wants his hand held. He wants a kiss.

The second half does the same trick again. He asks his beloved to fill his heart with song and let him sing forever, because this person is everything he longs for and worships. And again he undercuts the grandeur with a translation: in plainer language, please be true. In plainer language still, I love you.

That structure, cosmic image followed by plain confession, is the whole engine of the song, and it is why Howard's original title mattered so much to him. "In Other Words" is a lyric about the gap between how love feels and how embarrassingly simple it sounds when you say it out loud. Everybody has felt the first thing. Everybody has stumbled over the second. The moon and the planets are not destinations; they are the oversized metaphors you reach for when the real sentence is too small for what is in your chest.

There is a telling anecdote here. Early on, a publisher reportedly suggested changing the opening request from flying to the moon to something like taking me to the moon, on the theory that it was more singable. Howard refused. The verb matters. Flying is something you do together, in motion, side by side, not something that is done to you. It keeps the two lovers as partners rather than passenger and chauffeur, which is the quiet emotional logic of the whole piece.

Sinatra's performance understands this perfectly. Listen to how he treats the big images and the small ones differently. The planetary lines get the full ring-a-ding confidence, the almost arrogant ease of a man who has sung in front of presidents. But the plain lines, the ones about hands and honesty, he pulls back, softens, lets the band carry. He is in on the joke of the song: the swagger is a costume, and underneath it is a man asking for something very basic and hoping he gets it.

Quincy Jones's arrangement doubles that reading. The flute at the top is intimate, almost a whisper. The brass hits are the fireworks. The two keep trading off for two and a half minutes, exactly as the lyric trades off between cosmos and kitchen table.

Cultural Context and Legacy: How a Nightclub Waltz Went to the Moon

Nobody in 1954 was thinking about rockets when they heard this song. Sputnik was still three years away. But by the time Sinatra recorded it in 1964, the United States and the Soviet Union were in a full-blown race, and President Kennedy had already promised a man on the Moon before the decade's end. A song called "Fly Me to the Moon," sung by the most American of American voices over the most American of big bands, was always going to get drafted.

The draft was literal. In May 1969 the crew of Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for the landing, carried cassette tapes into lunar orbit and Sinatra's recording was among them. Two months later, Buzz Aldrin reportedly brought a portable cassette player onto the surface of the Moon during Apollo 11 and played the track, making it, by most accounts, the first music ever heard on another world. Quincy Jones has repeated the story with evident pride for decades. Whether every detail is precise is hard to verify from the mission transcripts, but the association stuck so completely that NASA itself has leaned into it ever since.

Sinatra, for his part, performed the song in honour of the Apollo astronauts at a 1969 event and kept it in his live set for the rest of his career. When he sang it he would often dedicate it to the crews, and the arrangement he used on stage stayed remarkably close to Jones's 1964 chart. For a performer who constantly re-recorded and reinterpreted his catalogue, that loyalty says something.

The song's second life has been on screen. It has scored everything from Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" to Clint Eastwood's "Space Cowboys," and in the mid-1990s it reached a whole new global audience as the closing theme of the Japanese animated series "Neon Genesis Evangelion," which commissioned dozens of alternate versions by its voice cast. In Japan, a generation that had never heard of Bart Howard came to know the melody intimately. More recently it has turned up in video games, in "Bayonetta" as a looping battle theme and in the "Evangelion"-adjacent corners of fan culture, which means a surprising number of twenty-somethings first met this 1954 cabaret tune while dodging attacks on a console.

By Howard's own reckoning the song had been recorded more than three hundred times before he died in 2004, by artists as different as Astrud Gilberto, Tony Bennett, Diana Krall and Bobby Womack. He said it allowed him to live comfortably for the rest of his life, which is a nice ending for a song about a man who felt he lacked the right words.

Why It Still Resonates Today

Standards survive for different reasons. Some survive on melody alone. Some survive because one definitive recording freezes them in amber. "Fly Me to the Moon" survives because it does something unusual: it lets the listener be both grand and sheepish at once.

The opening lines give you permission to be ridiculous, to ask for the stars, to overstate everything. Then the song gently brings you back down and lets you say the simple thing. That emotional arc is a small masterclass in how people actually express affection. We rarely lead with the plain sentence. We lead with jokes, with exaggeration, with the moon, and only once the other person is smiling do we risk the truth. Howard wrote that pattern into the structure, and Sinatra, who built a whole persona around armour over vulnerability, was the ideal person to sing it.

It also helps that the recording is a near-perfect two and a half minutes. There is no fat. The flute, the walk-in from the rhythm section, the first verse at conversational volume, the brass eruption, the modulation, the swaggering final chorus, the clipped ending. You can play it at a wedding, in a cocktail bar, at a funeral, in a Tokyo anime convention, on the Moon, and it will fit. Very few recordings in the history of popular music can make that claim.

And then there is the sheer symbolic weight. Every July, when the anniversary of the first lunar landing comes around, this song gets played again, and a new set of listeners discovers that the most audacious thing humans ever did was accompanied by a nightclub tune about wanting to hold someone's hand. It is hard to think of a better summary of why people do audacious things in the first place.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• It Might as Well Be Swing (Frank Sinatra with Count Basie, 1964) — The album the song comes from, and arguably the loosest, most joyful record Sinatra ever made. Hearing "Fly Me to the Moon" in sequence with "The Best Is Yet to Come" and "I Wish You Love" shows how Quincy Jones built an entire mood, not just one hit, out of Basie's rhythm section and Sinatra's late-night confidence.
• Sinatra at the Sands (1966) — The live album, recorded in Las Vegas with Basie and Jones, catches the song in its natural habitat: a room full of people, a band that could turn on a dime, and a singer having the time of his life. The between-song patter is a time capsule of mid-1960s Vegas.
• Joe Harnell, "Fly Me to the Moon (Bossa Nova)" (1962) — The instrumental that changed the song's rhythm from waltz to 4/4 and made the Sinatra version possible. Put it next to a 1950s cabaret recording such as Kaye Ballard's and you can hear the exact moment the tune stopped being a sigh and started being a stroll.

📚 Follow the story

• Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones — Jones tells the story of the Sinatra and Basie sessions in his own voice, including the Apollo connection he has cherished for half a century. It is also a vivid portrait of what it meant to be a young Black arranger handed the most powerful singer in America at 31.
• Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art by Will Friedwald — The most detailed book on how Sinatra actually worked in the studio, session by session. Friedwald's chapter on the Reprise and Basie years explains why the 1964 recording sounds so relaxed and why Sinatra never messed with it afterwards.
• American Popular Song by Alec Wilder — Wilder, a composer himself, walks through how the great standards are built, and his approach is the ideal lens for understanding why Bart Howard's little waltz works so well: a simple melodic shape, a big image, and a humble payoff.

🌍 Visit the places

• East 55th Street, Manhattan — The Blue Angel closed in 1964, the same year Sinatra recorded the song, and the building has long since changed hands, but walking the block between Lexington and Third gives you a sense of the compact, glamorous Midtown that produced the cabaret standards. Pair it with a drink at one of the surviving hotel bars nearby and the era comes back quickly.
• Kennedy Space Center, Florida — The launch complex from which Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 left for the Moon. Standing beneath the restored Saturn V in the Apollo/Saturn V Center and knowing that a Sinatra cassette rode a rocket like this one changes how you hear the record forever.
• Hoboken, New Jersey — Sinatra's birthplace across the Hudson from Manhattan. There is a plaque at the site of his childhood home, a small museum collection, and a waterfront park named after him with a view of the skyline he spent his life singing about.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn the original waltz first — Before you try the swing version, play Bart Howard's melody in 3/4 at a slow tempo, as a lullaby. Then shift to 4/4 and swing the eighth notes. The transformation you feel under your fingers is exactly what Harnell and Jones did to the song, and it teaches more about rhythm than any lecture.
• Sing the two registers differently — Pick the planetary lines and the plain lines and consciously change your delivery between them, big and brassy for one, quiet and close for the other. Most karaoke performers belt the whole thing; the song only works when you let the simple lines be simple.
• Build a Jones-style chart with friends — Even a trio can mimic the arrangement's logic: a soft intro instrument, a walking bass, and one loud "brass" hit on the turnaround. Record it on your phone and notice how much of the Sinatra magic comes from dynamics rather than volume.

🎵 Listen to this song