Sinatra is the essence of vocal style. This man has an innate quality of knowing what is good musically. You can sum that up best by saying that he has musical integrity. Even when he does a bad song, there's a good quality in the presentation.
When we first went to L.A., Howard Koch, who was the head of Paramount Pictures and later President of the Oscars, threw a welcome lunch for us at his house. There were all these stars there - Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Lucille Ball, Natalie Wood, Henry Mancini.
Unlike Frank Sinatra, I have no regrets in my life. Zero. Whatever hardships I have faced, or have caused myself, are moments I have to embrace in order to move forward. I have no problem coming to grips with either the highs or lows in my life.
And I did feel there was an album to be made about winter that can make you feel the way Sinatra and Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline make me feel - warm, nostalgic and comforted.
I was able to put something back. I was able to be of help to [Frank Sinatra] when he needed my help - and he did need somebody's help.
I listen to Frank Sinatra before my fight a lot, and I also listen to Orisha music, so both of those, I need, it's weird. It's a weird combination.
When I was a kid in the late '60s and early '70s, my parents and their friends would play the records of Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como, music with string arrangements and men singing songs that sounded sad whether they were or not.
The great thing about Google is that you type in neuro-surgery and somehow you end up with Peter Sellers or watching Frank Sinatra. Google is a great resource.
Opening for Mr. Sinatra in 1991 enabled me to do Vegas more as an opening act. I did the Superdome with him, probably nine arenas over a year and a half, and his second-to-last appearance at the Desert Inn in Vegas.
Rob Thomas, the Action Bronson and the Riff Raff. Both the musicians, they know who I am and they know I come from oldest country in the world and if I want my words like the music. I forever love them like the Frank Sinatra.
The happiest people I know are the ones that are still working. The saddest are the ones who are retired. Very few performers retire on their own. It's usually because no one wants them. Six years ago Sinatra announced his retirement. He's still working.
When Sinatra was alive and singing, he was constantly changing orchestrators from one album to the next because he said he didn't want every record to sound like every other record.
The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller - he's this as much as he's anything else. He takes time telling stories, too.
No one controlled Frank Sinatra or told him how to sing. No secret group of managers has been telling someone like Jay-Z what to do or how to look. And no one tells me what to do except me and the people who believe in me.
I always been writing songs since I was, like, six. I was listening to Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Frankie Laine and people like that. I was just in the backyard writing songs.
You know, legends are people like Haggard and Jones and Wills and Sinatra. Those people are legends. I'm just a young buck out here trying to keep in that same circle with the rest of 'em.
The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the '50s. Load a playlist of rock n' roll royalty. You're spoilt for choice.
I'm a good party guest...the problem is, I feel like I'm working all the time. "Give us an Elvis Presley story! Give us a Frank Sinatra story!"
We grew up listening to a variety of music, such as Gospel/Christian, R&B old/new school, jazz, blues, Mozart, Mary Poppins, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, just to name a few. I love opera, too - went to state in high school as a soloist.
I worked with practically everybody in the business in all of the years in NBC, but I worked personally many years with people like Crosby and Sinatra, so of course that was a great ground school for me.
There are a lot of actors who try to get records made and try to make record deals, and everybody goes, 'Ugh.' It used to be expected in the entertainment business. I mean look at Sinatra, Bing Crosby. All these guys started out as singers.
It pleases me that Frank Sinatra's music still has an audience, because many people who have come into the music world and then passed out of the music world are long since forgotten. He has been able to enjoy this great longevity.
Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the '30s and '40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we've ever had.
Someone asked me the other day, 'Do you get upset when people say you are the young Frank Sinatra?' It doesn't upset me. It is a huge compliment, but it is false.
My father was a part of that generation, and my mother, too - the late-'30s, early-'40s big-band generation. Frank Sinatra, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday - all that stuff was in my background.
As an entertainer, Justin Timberlake has learned from the past. He can cradle a mic stand like Elvis Presley, move like Michael Jackson, and swoon like Frank Sinatra.
It's not an easy task, believe me. How the hell do you replace Frank Sinatra? There's no way anybody can do that. But as far as I'm concerned, if there is music to be made and I have to wear somebody else's clothes, I can't think of anybody's I'd rather wear.
The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
I'm a 'never say never' girl. Frank Sinatra retired four times. He kept coming back. But there are people in our business who want to die on stage. Literally. I don't want to do that.
I'd come home from school alone with those teenage blues and I'd put on Frank Sinatra's It was a very good year. Here was this mature man singing about the cycle of his life, and as a kid I felt the emotions of it already. It has since been a touchstone for me whenever I want to experiment musically.
I always have music. I love it to be very upbeat. When you're having drinks, I like something like Cesaria Evora. During dinner, I like the much more traditional - old Frank Sinatra and things like that.
I got one entire song from fortune cookies (Land of Sunshine). On another one, I took words from different Frank Sinatra songs and pasted them together. Another one, I was just driving around and there was a piece of paper on the ground, so I stole it.
When I lived in Las Vegas, I was meeting everybody: Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones - we won't go there - but all these people that were working in Vegas a million years ago, way before I was Elvira.
When I look at great singers like Sinatra, Bennett and (Tom) Jones, I see great performers that can really move an audience. I really consider myself a troubadour privately and a song-plugger publicly.
I went with a friend to see Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, in the last year that he was performing. He wasn't necessarily on top form, but the way he could connect with an audience and the way he communicated through the lyrics was something I hadn't ever really seen before.
You don't show respect to Frank Sinatra and his great example by trying to sound exactly like him. You show it by sounding exactly like you, and that's the way jazz has always progressed as an art form.
When Sinatra said, 'For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer I've ever heard,' it changed my career completely. He was my best friend, and I was his best friend... but I was never part of the Rat Pack.
I love New York. You want to find out if you're any good? Try New York. Who sang that? Frank Sinatra? If you make it here, you can make it anywhere.
I've learned that people latch onto labels and stereotypes. There was a period when I was asked in every single interview how I liked being the new Frank Sinatra... I think people will soon realize that I do a lot more than interpret old songs.
Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.
Frank Sinatra did 'Born Free', Tony Bennett did 'Walkabout,' but you have no control over who does what, really. So you just hold yourself responsible for the stuff you do, and then get filthy rich on all this stuff that other people have done.
I saw Sinatra many times. I saw him at Caesars. I saw him at the Sands.
I always refer back to the days of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, the Rat Pack. Back when everyone wore a suit because that's what it was to be an entertainer. You were stylish and you were fly, and it was an effortless fly.
Frank Sinatra was a great singer, but my favourite is Sammy Davis Jr. He had incredible versatility in his voice, often doing impressions of people. It's always going to be classic, and you'll never get bored listening.
Here's the mark that a lot of people miss nowadays. Producers missed. They leave out the heart and soul. And that's what I learned from Sammy Davis, Jr., from Frank Sinatra, is when you went to go see those shows, you got to know them.
The inaugural of Ronald Reagan, with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And that was the greatest thing. Ronald Reagan and George Bush. That was - I still remember like it was yesterday.
I think they [Martin Scorsese, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra] liked my honesty. My personality. For that, they always treated me great. I, in turn, treated them great. No secret about it. My being who I am - that is that.
I don't have a nice singing voice! Particularly if I've had a few beers, that's when I'll get up and go on the karaoke. I'll usually try to murder a Frank Sinatra song like 'My Way'. In my head I sound exactly like him, but when you watch the footage back, evidently not!
My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.'
I know there are a lot of tough stories out there about Sinatra, but he was so sweet to Bobby and me. He even had us replace him one night in the main room. He didn't get Sammy or Dean; he said, 'I want the kids to do it.' Man, what an honor.
My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.
No press conference announcing a last film. I'd just steal away. Best way because, if by chance after two or three years something interesting comes up, I would not - like Sinatra - have to say: 'Well, I've thought it over and decided to come back.'
My dad was kind of a pool shark and had a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin thing going on. I've always been fascinated by the fifties because of him. There was a hip, cool, anything-goes atmosphere back then, but looking good was still a priority.
Sinatra had a lot of mood swings, but he was wonderful to my wife Barbara and to me. He made no bones about who he liked and who he loved, and he had this great charisma. When he walked into a room, it stopped. I've only seen that happen with Ronald Reagan.
There was no way I was ever going to get a fair shake. How good could I be? I was Canadian. I wasn't from New York. I wasn't from Vegas. I was born in 1975, not 1917. My last name wasn't Sinatra or Darin or Martin. Early on and often, there was always the comparison. "He's good, but he's no '[fill in the] blank.'
If someone had told me when I was a kid I'd get an ovation from Frank Sinatra! One time, I did a song called 'I Am A Singer', but I rewrote the words for Frank. I was in tears and, when he got up, so was he.
I learned by listening to other people sing and doing impressions of them. And there are things no one can ever teach you, like phrasing. By listening to Sinatra, for instance - you felt that everything he sang had happened in his life.
My memories of Las Vegas were all with my father when I was, like, a teenager. He was best friends with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and we'd come up and see the shows and go backstage afterwards and have dinner together. It was one of my first educations about stars and how they really are back stage.
Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. He perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that archetype did not exist in American popular culture.
There was a time in medieval England when they had wandering minstrels ... A wandering minstrel would have been Frank Sinatra's counterpart had he lived during the time of Henry II in 1190 or 1180.
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