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I began collecting when I was five years old. My parents would take me to second-hand stores in Columbus, OH where I could buy old 78 records for a nickel apiece; and even though I could barely read the labels, I would take home as many as my weekly allowance could afford and savor them in my basement lair. Admittedly at that age I was hardly a connoisseur, but even then I loved the sounds of those old songs and was captivated by the emotions and ideas and even the vibrations that emanated so magically from that plain black disk. As I grew older and began making music myself I became increasingly curious about where it came from. Who wrote it? How was it notated and arranged and published and recorded? Who were the people who performed it, and what made them so great?
-Michael Feinstein
Michael Feintstein's American Songbook airs October 6, 13 and 20 on PBS.
Feinstein's Collection: Meet Cyd Charisse
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Feinstein's Collection: The Same Hello
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Feinstein's Collection: Curator's Note
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Feinstein's Collection: Moon River Demo
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Feinstein's Collection: Rockin' the Town
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Feinstein's Collection: Bing Crosby Disk
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Feinstein's Collection: My Intuition
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Feinstein's Collection: Gershwin Photo Album
Feinstein's Collection: Gershwin Notebook
Michael Feinstein writes:
This song was originally written for Frank Sinatra, and lay dormant for nearly thirty years until I heard about it from my friends Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the lyricists who wrote so many songs for Sinatra, going back to "Nice & Easy." In the late 1970s, Sinatra called Alan & Marilyn and asked them to "write something: a performance piece, a dramatic song cycle, maybe 10-15 minutes long, boy-meets-girl-boy-gets-girl-boy-loses-girl." Intrigued by the challenge, they decided to base the piece on Frank's personal life–-he was always falling in love with different women but, in their view anyway, it was always the same kind of woman with the same personality.
After they first performed it for him, with John Williams at the piano and Alan singing, Sinatra was in tears. "How do you know so much about my life?" he asked. Marilyn smiled and said "It’s not as if your life was a closed book." Sinatra was all fired up: "I can’t wait to sing this, thank you so much." But it never happened. It was late in his career, he wasn’t able to properly learn it and didn’t want to do it unless he could "nail it." After I heard this story, I asked for - and received - permission to perform and record one of the songs from that song cycle for my 2008 recording "The Sinatra Project." The recording features a gorgeous band arrangement by Bill Elliott; in this video, it's just me at the piano, but the power of the material still comes through.
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