My Way

The Song Sinatra Couldn't Stand

Here is the strangest thing about the most famous Frank Sinatra song ever recorded: Frank Sinatra did not like it. Not at first, not at the end, and by many accounts not at any point in between. His daughter Tina has said flatly that her father loathed it. In concert, in his later years, he would introduce it with weary jokes, sometimes telling audiences he had sung it so many times he could not bear it anymore, before launching into it anyway because the room demanded it. He thought the sentiment was self-serving and self-indulgent, a man standing on a stage congratulating himself.

And yet the song became him. When people who have never heard a full Sinatra album picture the man, they picture this: the tuxedo, the orchestra swelling behind him, the chin lifted, the grand declaration that life was lived on nobody's terms but his own. The gap between what the singer felt and what the world heard is the real story of "My Way," and it is a story that begins not in Las Vegas or Hoboken but in a French recording studio, with a very different kind of sadness.

From a French Breakup to an American Boast

In 1967 a French pop star named Claude François released a song called "Comme d'habitude," which translates roughly as "as usual." The melody came from composer Jacques Revaux, and François shaped the lyric with Gilles Thibaut. It was not a song about triumph. It was a song about routine, specifically the routine of a relationship that has gone cold. The narrator describes the small mechanical movements of a shared day: waking beside someone, pretending to still feel something, going through the motions, coming home to more pretending. François had reportedly just split from the singer France Gall, and the song carried that bruised, resigned quality. It was a modest hit in France, a sad, elegant little record about two people who no longer see each other.

The melody, though, was enormous. It had a slow build, a sense of inevitability, verses that climbed step by step toward a chorus that opened up like a door. A melody like that does not stay in one language for long.

The first English attempt came from an unlikely source. A young, still-unknown David Bowie was given the tune by a publisher and wrote a lyric called "Even a Fool Learns to Love." It was rejected, and Bowie would later channel his frustration into his own masterpiece, "Life on Mars?", whose chord progression quietly echoes the French original. The liner notes for that song famously credited the inspiration to "Frankie," a wink at the man who ended up with the melody instead.

That man got it through Paul Anka. Anka was a Canadian singer who had been a teen idol in the late 1950s with hits like "Diana" and "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," and by 1968 he was in his late twenties, past the teen-idol phase and hungry for a second act. On a holiday in Paris he heard "Comme d'habitude" on television, and something about the melody grabbed him. He flew to Paris and negotiated the adaptation rights. By his own account he paid nothing for them; the French publishers simply let him have the right to write new English words, which in hindsight ranks among the great bargains in music history.

A Dinner in Florida and a Night in New York

Anka did not write the lyric right away. The trigger came later, at a dinner in Florida with Sinatra and a few friends. Sinatra, then in his early fifties, was in a dark mood. He had just come off a rough stretch, his marriage to Mia Farrow was collapsing, rock and roll had taken over the charts, and he told the table he was tired of the business and planning to quit. He said, in Anka's recollection, that he wanted to do one more album and then get out.

Anka went back to New York with that conversation rattling around his head. At around one in the morning he sat at his typewriter and asked himself a simple question: if Frank Sinatra were writing a song about his own life right now, what would he say? He has described the lyric pouring out over the next few hours, finished by five in the morning. He deliberately wrote in a voice that was not his own, using the kind of tough, slightly crude phrasing Sinatra used in conversation, imagining the man's swagger and his exhaustion at the same time.

The result was a complete reversal of the French original. Where "Comme d'habitude" was about a life going nowhere, Anka's lyric was about a life that had gone everywhere. The narrator is an older man looking back from near the end, taking stock. He admits to mistakes but insists they were few. He acknowledges doubts and hard times but frames every one as something he faced and swallowed. The central claim, repeated like a creed, is that whatever happened, he did it on his own terms. Anka reportedly called Sinatra in Las Vegas and read him the lyric over the phone. Sinatra, who rarely got excited about anything, said he was in.

Sinatra recorded it on December 30, 1968, in Hollywood, with an arrangement by Don Costa that treated the melody like a slow coronation: quiet piano and strings at the start, brass arriving midway, a full orchestral surge at the finish. It is said he nailed it in a single take, though stories like that attach themselves to Sinatra sessions so often that it is wise to treat them gently. The track became the title song of his 1969 album and was released as a single that spring.

What the Song Is Really Saying

Strip away the brass and what you have is a deathbed speech. The narrator makes clear from the opening that the end is close, and that this is the moment to lay everything out. That framing matters. "My Way" is not a young man's boast; it is an old man's defence. There is a difference between saying "I will do it my way" and saying "I did it my way," and the song lives entirely in the second tense. Everything is already decided. The listener is being asked not to cheer the narrator on but to agree with his verdict on himself.

The verses move through the ordinary inventory of a life: the roads chosen, the plans made and abandoned, the full helping of experience taken rather than refused. There is a verse about love and loss, and another about the moments when he took on more than he could handle. The lyric never pretends the narrator was always right. It does something more interesting: it argues that being right was never the point. The point was ownership. Mistakes made freely are, in this moral universe, worth more than successes handed to you.

The most quietly radical idea comes near the end, where the narrator asks what a man actually is if he does not possess himself. The answer the song gives is that a man who kneels, who says the words others want to hear rather than what he feels, has nothing. It is a philosophy of radical individualism, bordering on stubbornness, and it is exactly why Sinatra squirmed. He heard a lyric that sounded like bragging. The audience heard permission to forgive themselves.

That gap explains why the song works at funerals and karaoke bars alike. Sung over a coffin, it is a eulogy that says the departed lived fully and without apology. Sung at midnight after three drinks, it is a temporary suit of armour. It gives anyone, regardless of what their life has actually looked like, the chance to stand up and claim it as deliberate.

Britain Fell Hardest

In the United States the single did respectably but not spectacularly, peaking in the lower reaches of the Top 30 on the main chart while climbing to the upper reaches of the easy listening chart. The United Kingdom was another matter entirely. "My Way" never reached number one in Britain, topping out at number five, but it refused to leave. The single spent a reported 75 weeks in the UK Top 40, a record that stood for decades and was set across multiple chart runs as the song kept re-entering. For the better part of a year and a half, British record buyers simply would not let it go.

The British relationship with the song only deepened from there. Welsh singer Dorothy Squires released a dramatic version in 1970 that charted alongside Sinatra's, and it became her signature. Then, in 1978, came the version that turned the song inside out: Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, filmed for "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle," sneering his way through a punk demolition of it, complete with altered words and a finale involving a pistol pointed at the audience. It was a joke, an insult, and somehow also a tribute, because you cannot parody something that small. Sinatra reportedly was not amused. British listeners understood both versions perfectly, and for years the song sat at or near the top of surveys of the most requested music at UK funerals, compiled by funeral directors who noticed the same title turning up again and again.

Elvis Presley took it on too, performing it in his 1973 "Aloha from Hawaii" satellite broadcast, and a live recording became a posthumous hit after his death in 1977, which gave the song a second life as a eulogy for a different American giant. Nina Simone recorded a slow, smouldering version in 1971. The Gipsy Kings turned it into a flamenco rumba as "A Mi Manera." Luciano Pavarotti sang it with Sinatra. The melody has proven almost indestructible, surviving genre, language, and intent.

Retirement, Return, and a Song That Would Not Leave

The irony Anka could not have planned is that Sinatra actually did quit. In 1971, two years after "My Way," he announced his retirement and gave a farewell concert in Los Angeles. He was back on stage by 1973. For the rest of his career, which stretched into the mid-1990s, the song followed him like a shadow. He sang it at Madison Square Garden in 1974 for the televised "Main Event" concert. He sang it in Las Vegas showrooms, in European arenas, in stadiums in his seventies when his voice had thickened and his memory for lyrics had begun to slip. It became the song audiences waited for, and the one he most wanted to skip.

There is a famous darker chapter too. In the Philippines, where karaoke is a national pastime, a string of violent incidents in bars during the 2000s became known in the press as the "My Way killings." The pattern, as reported, involved arguments over off-key or arrogant performances of the song that escalated into fights, sometimes fatal ones. Some bars removed it from their machines entirely. Whether the song itself was really to blame or simply the most popular karaoke choice in a country with many late-night disputes is debated, but the fact that it became the lightning rod says something about how much ego the song carries. You do not sing "My Way" quietly.

Anka, meanwhile, has lived his entire later life in the shadow of four hours at a typewriter. He titled his own memoir after the song. He has said that it still earns him a fortune in royalties every year and that he never tires of hearing it, which puts him in the opposite camp from the man who sang it.

Why It Still Lands

Every generation produces its own anthem of defiance, and most of them age badly because they are rooted in a particular grievance or fashion. "My Way" avoids that trap because it is not about anything specific. There is no enemy named, no era described, no cause. It is a template. Anyone can pour a life into it.

That universality is also why it is easy to mock. The song has been called pompous, kitsch, the musical equivalent of a man in a too-tight tuxedo telling you about his yacht. All of that is fair. But the reason it survives the mockery is that underneath the pomp sits a genuinely vulnerable idea: that at the end, you want to be able to say the choices were yours. The narrator is not actually certain he was right. He is certain only that he chose. In an age where people feel increasingly managed by algorithms, employers, and circumstances they did not pick, that small insistence on authorship still cuts through.

It helps that Sinatra, for all his private contempt, sang it like he meant it. Whatever he thought about the words, he understood performance, and he understood that the audience in front of him needed the song to be true. He gave it to them. That is perhaps the final irony: a song about doing things your own way became the thing Frank Sinatra did, for thirty years, because other people wanted him to.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• My Way (Frank Sinatra album, 1969) — The song sits at the centre of a record that also includes Sinatra's takes on "Yesterday" and "Mrs. Robinson," a snapshot of an ageing crooner reckoning with a rock-and-roll world. Hearing the title track in context, surrounded by songs written by people half his age, makes the defiance feel less like a boast and more like a man drawing a line.
• Sinatra: The Main Event (Live, 1974) — Recorded at Madison Square Garden the year after his comeback from retirement, this is the song in its natural habitat: a boxing-ring stage, a roaring New York crowd, and a singer who had just proven he was not finished. The version here has a swagger the studio original only hints at.
• Claude François, "Comme d'habitude" (1967) — Go back to the source and the whole story snaps into focus. The same melody carries a completely different emotional weight, hushed and defeated instead of triumphant, and it is a lesson in how much a lyric can change a tune.

📚 Follow the story

• Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan — The second volume of Kaplan's monumental biography covers the late 1960s in detail, including the professional slump, the marriage to Mia Farrow, and the mood that led Sinatra to tell Paul Anka he wanted out. It gives the song a context that casual listeners rarely hear.
• My Way: An Autobiography by Paul Anka — Anka tells the Paris, Florida, and typewriter story himself, along with decades of Las Vegas gossip and the strange experience of becoming famous twice for very different reasons. His account of imagining Sinatra's voice while writing is the heart of the book.
• My Father's Daughter by Tina Sinatra — The daughter's memoir is where the claim that Sinatra loathed the song comes from, and it paints a portrait of a complicated, moody man who was never as sure of himself as his signature tune suggested.

🌍 Visit the places

• Hoboken, New Jersey — Sinatra's birthplace sits across the Hudson from Manhattan, and the waterfront Frank Sinatra Park and Frank Sinatra Drive look straight at the skyline he would come to own. The modest streets where he grew up are the opposite of the song's grandeur, which is exactly the point.
• Las Vegas, Nevada — The Sands is long gone, but the Strip remains the stage where Sinatra sang "My Way" more often than anywhere else. Caesars Palace, where he performed through the 1970s and 1980s, still trades on his legend, and the Mob Museum downtown covers the era he defined.
• Palm Springs, California — Sinatra's Twin Palms estate, with its piano-shaped swimming pool, is where he lived during the period the song was recorded. The house can be toured or rented, and the desert town is scattered with mid-century landmarks from the Rat Pack years.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Sing it at karaoke, but with respect — The song is a staple on every karaoke machine on earth for a reason: the melody rises gradually and rewards a singer who paces the build. Save the big voice for the final verse, keep the early lines conversational, and remember the Philippines before you get too cocky.
• Learn the arrangement on piano — The chord progression is a classic slow climb through a major key, and the Don Costa arrangement translates beautifully to a single instrument. Working through it reveals why Bowie borrowed the shape for "Life on Mars?"
• Write your own version — Anka's genius was to take someone else's melody and write a lyric in another person's voice. Try the same exercise: pick a person you know well, imagine their life summed up in a final speech, and fit it to the tune. It is harder, and more revealing, than it sounds.

🎵 Listen to this song