Thanks to a decadeslong love of Frank Sinatra and a relationship with his family that started when Frank Sinatra Jr. guest-starred on Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane was entrusted with a gold mine of never-released material arranged for the late crooner that has become his just-released ninth studio album, Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements.
“If you’re an aficionado of this kind of music, it’s like being a Lennon-McCartney fan and finding something that was written in like 1969 that was just never played,” MacFarlane tells Billboard‘s Pop Shop Podcast of Frank’s daughter, Tina Sinatra, approaching him with the opportunity to dig into 1,200 archival boxes of unrecorded sheet music arranged specifically for her dad. “And you hear it, and it’s like, ‘My God.’
“You know, the songs that we have are the songs that we have from his discography; obviously he’s gone, the arrangers are gone, so there’s nothing new. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, you know what? There’s one more cookie at the bottom of the bag.’”
Listen to MacFarlane’s full interview in the new Pop Shop Podcast episode below:
Below, find highlights from our conversation with MacFarlane, and listen to the full chat in the podcast above.
Did Seth know these songs before digging in?
In many cases, no one has ever heard of them, because they just didn’t exist. There’s a song called “Who’s in Your Arms Tonight” — you could travel to the ends of the earth before we did this, and you would not find a single person who knows that song, because it just was never recorded, and everyone involved with this writing is long gone. … We asked the oldest guys in the band — I mean, our bassist played for Frank Sinatra for years in the last part of his life, and he had no idea what this was. So about a third of the songs on the album are songs in which both the song and the arrangement are just completely unknown.
What stood out in these unreleased arrangements?
Particularly in the case of [Sinatra arranger] Nelson Riddle, you could instantly hear his signature trademarks, like those flutes. And that was what was so interesting. There was no question who wrote this, but it was new. It was familiar stylistically, but it was new, in the same way you watch a Wes Anderson movie that’s brand-new, you’re instantly going to know it’s him. You’re going to see his visual touchstones, but the movie’s brand-new. That’s kind of how it was. It was so clearly Nelson Riddle, but we were hearing the first new Nelson Riddle chart that anyone has heard in decades. So it was a pretty profound moment.
Is there a duet opportunity for frequent collaborator Liz Gillies or Carpool Karaoke partner Ariana Grande?
It would have been nice if we had found some, you know, Rosemary Clooney or Peggy Lee duet. I mean, Liz would have been my first call. For this kind of music, there’s just no one better on the planet, but so far, we have not found any duets. We haven’t dug through these boxes in such detail that there couldn’t be one — there may be. There are 1,200 boxes. We couldn’t play everything on that day because an orchestra is expensive. … But there’s so much in that archive that it is possible, and, yeah, if we find something, then we’ll give Liz a call.
How long could Seth be mining this material?
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. [Laughs] So I do remember us pushing back and saying, “Let’s do an album’s worth of songs for this thing.” So it’s a dozen songs, which, for a Sinatra album, was in the ballpark. And there were a couple songs that we did record that were not included that would be on the next one. … There are probably two albums’ worth of real, honest-to-God songs that can be released.
On his July 3-5 stint at Voltaire Las Vegas
Is three days a residency? [Laughs] I once spent a week in Vegas, and I was like, “I’m forgetting who I am. I’m an insane person. The walls are moving.” That’s a lot of Vegas.
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Also on this week’s Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Taylor Swift’s former No. 1 album reputation, released in 2017, jumps from No. 78 to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 following an outpouring of fan support of the project after Swift announced she had acquired her Big Machine Records-era music catalog. Plus, SEVENTEEN and Miley Cyrus’ latest releases debut in the top five, while the top slots on both the Billboard 200 and Billboard Hot 100 are static, with Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” staying put.
We also hit the biggest pop headlines of the week, including Sabrina Carpenter’s new “Manchild” single and video, Darren Criss and Nicole Scherzinger winning at the Tony Awards, David Byrne joining Olivia Rodrigo onstage at Governors Ball, and Mariah Carey returning with her new Eric B. & Rakim-sampling single “Type Dangerous.”
The Billboard Pop Shop Podcast is your one-stop shop for all things pop on Billboard‘s weekly charts. You can always count on a lively discussion about the latest pop news, fun chart stats and stories, new music, and guest interviews with music stars and folks from the world of pop. Casual pop fans and chart junkies can hear Billboard‘s executive digital director, West Coast, Katie Atkinson and Billboard’s managing director, charts and data operations, Keith Caulfield every week on the podcast, which can be streamed on Billboard.com or downloaded in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast provider. (Click here to listen to the previous edition of the show on Billboard.com.)
