My Way, by Liam Nolan
Although it became known as one of his signature songs, Frank Sinatra grew to loathe My Way. Many people thought he had written it himself. He didn’t write it.
On-stage microphones more than once picked him up saying, at concerts where he performed it, “I can’t stand this song.” His daughter, Tina, said in 2000, “He always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent. He didn’t like it. That song stuck, and he couldn’t get it off his shoe.”
And yet almost every drunken uncle persuaded to sing at weddings, and every bar-room show-off who also probably likes to belt out Delira, will try to out-Sinatra Sinatra, bawling off key with tears in his eyes (and sometimes in the eyes of his listeners too), “I did it My Way”.
A Canadian pop star named Paul Anka (Diana and It’s Time to Cry) wrote the English words to the song after Sinatra told him he was tired of media speculation about his connections with the Mob; was fed up of being hounded by the FBI, and that he intended getting out of show business altogether.
On top of everything else Francis Albert was 51, and his marriage to Mia Farrow was in ruins.
