You know Seth MacFarlane’s voice. You’ve heard it a million times as Peter, Brian, and Stewie Griffin. Or maybe as Stan and Roger Smith on “American Dad!” Or maybe as the eponymous bear from the Ted movies.
If you’ve seen a Seth MacFarlane vehicle, you’ve not only heard his voice plenty, but you know that music, specifically the old classics and showtunes, are at the cornerstone of his creative output. MacFarlane always pulled off an impressive feat with his shows and movies, where the “edgy” and “irreverent” humor was always counterbalanced with an appreciation for the classics. MacFarlane, for all of the sophomoric humor, was always an old soul, it seems.
So for anyone familiar with MacFarlane’s work—any of it, really—hearing that he’s put out an album of Frank Sinatra songs isn’t too out of character.
Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements is more than just karaoke. MacFarlane, having already put out eight albums that showcase his natural gift for the croon and love for the Great American Songbook, dug deeper than the surface-level Sinatra hits and piece together 12 arrangements that were only partially finished at the time of his death.
“I was aware of Sinatra, but I didn’t really take the time to listen to Sinatra until I was in college,” MacFarlane says. “And when I did, I started to hear something that was very different from any other vocalist that I had heard before or since. It was what he was doing with the band. You could take Sinatra’s voice out. Set aside the fact that he remains, in my opinion, the greatest vocalist in the history of popular song, and I know I’m far from alone in that. You take his voice out of it, and there are things going on with the accompaniment, the orchestra, that are just so far beyond anything that you hear elsewhere, even at that time. If you listen to Dean Martin or Bing Crosby, the arrangements are fantastic, but what’s going on with Sinatra is something truly classical, something truly, truly great.”
Lush Life, which came out in June, is as much a love letter to the arrangements and the accompaniment, to Sinatra the bandleader, as it is to Sinatra the voice. Even if MacFarlane came to Sinatra relatively late, he had already developed a deep appreciation for the orchestra, something he carried with him for his whole career into animation, film, and television, and something that feels even more special in not only the digital age, but the age where someone can type in a prompt for a musical number and the robots have spat something out by the time they’ve poured a cup of coffee.
“I think even if the audience doesn’t know what they’re hearing is live acoustic music, it somehow makes the show feel a little more important. It makes it feel like it has a little more significance to it,” he says. “When I was a kid, every afternoon or Saturday morning cartoon show used an orchestra. You could hear it in the scores. And subsequently I managed to get my hands on some of those sessions from those old cartoons, and they’re surprisingly great. The quality of the composition was better than some movies today. It’s something that I think is oftentimes neglected. A show will spend millions and millions and millions of dollars to make a series look gorgeous with state-of-the-art visual effects and breathtaking photography, and then there will be, like, a Casio scoring it. And it always seems like they just didn’t skip the landing. So it’s something that I think is really important for any show, certainly an animated show.”
It’s crucial to note that MacFarlane is also far from just some rich fan playing Rat Pack Fantasy Camp here, throwing his showbiz weight and money around to get the rights to these songs. The Sinatra estate knew Seth already from his working relationship with Frank Sinatra Jr., who had multiple appearances on “Family Guy.” MacFarlane had established himself by now as not only an appreciator, but someone who had the musical chops and deep reverence for the music to take these fossils of ideas and bring them to life, faithfully. The last thing he wanted was to create a “Pet Sematary” version of his hero’s music.
And only now, after eight previous albums, does he feel like he was the man for the job.
“By the time we got around to this, I was comfortable enough settling into that Goldilocks zone of doing what it is that I do and making this a series of recordings that don’t just sound like covers,” he says. “But also, very much trying to keep in mind what not only Sinatra would have wanted, but what the arrangers would have wanted, perhaps more importantly. What Nelson Riddle would’ve wanted, Billy May and Don Costa, what these arrangers would’ve wanted out of these recordings. And so that was something that was very much in the forefront of my mind and the mind of [producer] Joel McNeely and [conductor] John Wilson and [engineer] Rich Breen and everyone else who worked on the album.”
“Everyone else” includes more than 60 players on the album.
After the Sinatra estate entrusted MacFarlane with the archives, he got to work with his team to start the archaeology aspect of it: using everything they knew about Sinatra’s arrangements and arrangers to find clues as to where these half-finished ideas were going.
“It was a lot of educated guesswork,” MacFarlane says. “If it was a Billy May chart, for example, there are certain hallmarks of his style that are instantly audible, and that would kind of serve as a little bit of an anchor and a little bit of a compass. Where it was, ‘OK, if he’s doing that with the saxes, he probably wants this a little slower, would be our guess.’ It’s from years of listening and getting an education in this music from the exploration of it on its own, but just working with all of these great musicians over the past 15 years from whom I’ve learned enormous amounts about each individual instrument. And so there are things in the charts that give you little clues that tell you maybe what was going on in the head of the arranger, and that can inform things like tempo and dynamics.”
MacFarlane says he’s glad that this opportunity struck now, rather than 15 years ago. But over his career in music, he’s tried to learn from everyone he’s worked with, and now feels adequately prepared to take on the challenge and face the higher stakes of what is essentially putting forth what he believes Frank Sinatra would have wanted for his music, and putting his own voice on it.
“It was a balance,” he says. “It was a balance between making this something that was very much ours and at the same time acknowledging that we want this to sound the way Sinatra and his arrangers would’ve wanted it to sound.”
Seth MacFarlane is very aware that you have heard his voice before, and chances are good that it was synced up with an animated character on the screen when you heard it. But he’s confident that the listener, by and large, will be able to separate him from wherever and whatever else they recognize him from.
“I’ve been very gratified that people have been able to separate this and recognize, by using their own ears, that we’re people who take this very seriously, and there’s nothing about it that’s slapped together,” MacFarlane says. “There’s nothing about it that’s a side gig. When we do it, we do it whole hog. […] We didn’t half-ass this. We didn’t treat this like a vanity project. This is serious fucking music. We love this music.”
This is the project that MacFarlane has been preparing his whole life for, in a way. He might not have ever guessed that some day, after countless seasons of what is now iconic adult comedy animation, a handful of films, even more television shows, he would be the guy that Frank Sinatra’s daughter would entrust her father’s legacy to. But, now that it’s happened, he’s sure glad he’s the one who got the call.
“On the one hand it was without a doubt a great honor, and on the other hand it was like, thank God, I wouldn’t want anyone to fuck this up,” MacFarlane says. “And I know we won’t fuck this up.”
