Background
In 2018, MacFarlane acquired the entire Sinatra music archive from the Sinatra family and estate. [3] Tina Sinatra, the daughter of Frank Sinatra, said the following, "Seth's interest and knowledge of my father's music is boundless. With arrangements by the masters, Nelson Riddle, Billy May and Don Costa, we can only wonder why these songs went un-produced. Thanks to Seth, we can now enjoy these lost Sinatra arrangements." [1] Shortly after, MacFarlane and Joel McNeely hired an orchestra over on the Fox Studio Lot and went through the arrangements. [4] McNeely described the experience, "This was the first one we read when we had a sight-reading session at Fox. We got an orchestra together just to see what was there, you know, because there was nothing to reference. But all this time later, these little black pencil dots on paper, there's his voice brought back to life. I mean, it was chilling." [5] He recorded the album at George Lucas' Skywalker Sound. MacFarlane collaborated with conductor John Wilson, whom he has performed with before in the BBC Proms in 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2015. [6]
Some of the songs were written for Sinatra's albums but were cut like "How Did She Look?," was intended for Only the Lonely , "Flying Down to Rio," was to be included in Come Fly with Me and "Shadows" was intended for Moonlight Sinatra but ultimately rejected. Several tracks on the album are familiar songs, but in previously unrecorded arrangements like "Give Me the Simple Life", "On a Wonderful Day Like Today" and "Arrivederci, Roma" for which MacFarlane wrote new lyrics. He explained his reasoning, "there was an Italian verse — the English refrain was already written, had been sung by many artists — but the verse was all in Italian. I don't know that Sinatra would've sung it that way. I remember Dean Martin singing a lot in Italian, but not Sinatra. And I certainly didn't want to subject anyone to my attempt. So we had it translated, and I wrote a new lyric for that verse based on the translated content. Hopefully, it blends well with the lyrics that already exist. That was one of the few bits of writing I had to do." [7] According to MacFarlane, because of the extensive songs from the library, several songs were cut. He said, "There are a couple [songs] that we recorded that we cut from this album, just because we had, I don't know, some edict to get it down to 12 songs or less. All I know is we were told initially, I think they wanted it to be like six songs. I'm, like, 'Guys, that's not an album.' I don't know, there's all this, like, marketing data that they go by, and really, nobody knows sh–, because if they did, everything would be a monster hit." [8]
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