over the phone. “I think I was No. 89 or something. It barely made it. ‘So Long Babe.’”The 83-year-old pop legend has a sharp memory. Her first Billboard Hot 100 hit, “So Long Babe,” hit No. 86 – just three spots away from her guess. Of course, that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who follows her on X . Sinatra regularly weighs in on everything from politics to AI to her celebrity pals’ birthdays.
Very much so. That early stuff was what we used to call bubblegum. I was a nervous wreck . I was eager to please because I knew I was going to be dropped from the label if I didn’t do something important enough to make the charts. It was nerve-racking.It got better. The fact that we had a chart record right away was the impetus to keep going. It gave me the confidence to know I was going in the right direction.
Absolutely. Each song dictates the vocal approach. The fact that the music was so completely different, the vocals just followed suit. I had no idea what it was about. I don’t know if Lee even had an idea either. Later on, in retrospect, he said something about Phaedra , that he wanted to pay tribute to Phaedra. That’s a bunch of bull. That never came up in all the years we’d performed. Never once. It was a lucky marriage of vocal sounds, strange as it may seem, and arrangement. He dictated the change in time signatures that occurs in the song. Lee asked Billy to do that.He was like a big brother.