It seems that there is one song that has been my theme song, one that followed me through the latter stages of my life, and that is that “fist in the air”, Frank Sinatra version of Paul Anka’s song, “My Way”. I recently had a new introduction to the song when I found it on Darlene’s HodgePodge several weeks ago. She had a video of the group Il Divo singing "My Way" and my love affair with the song started all over again.
This morning I was surprised to find an article written by Bono entitled,
“Notes from the Chairman”. It’s a great article and suddenly “My Way” began to have a whole new meaning, seemingly designed for all of us who are facing the many difficulties that this new year holds – wherever we live. I would strongly urge you to read the entire article, but I’m including an excerpt.
Notes From the Chairman
By BONO
Dublin
Once upon a couple of weeks ago ...
I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.
Interesting mood. The new Irish money has been gambled and lost; the Celtic Tiger’s tail is between its legs as builders and bankers laugh uneasy and hard at the last year, and swallow uneasy and hard at the new. There’s a voice on the speakers that wakes everyone out of the moment: it’s Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” His ode to defiance is four decades old this year and everyone sings along for a lifetime of reasons. I am struck by the one quality his voice lacks: Sentimentality.
Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.
A call to believability.
A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.”
That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.”
Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.
As the year rolls over (and with it many carousers), the emotion in the room tussles between hope and fear, expectation and trepidation. Wherever you end up, his voice takes you by the hand.
As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story, of course.
Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.
Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”
The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.
In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.
To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.
This is our moment. What do we hear?
In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.
Just reading this article, listening to the song one more time and the tears were running down my cheeks and my eyes were definitely "red". And that's okay, because the passion is still there, I haven't rolled over and for one more time I'm doing it all My Way!
