Something happened spiritually’: Paul Anka on writing My Way on CBC's Q with Tom Power

Q with Tom Power

Paul Anka was only 25 when he wrote Frank Sinatra’s signature song, My Way, in the late 1960s.

At that time, the Canadian singer-songwriter was spending most of his vacation time in the south of France with his new wife, Anne. One day, while sitting in a garden with the radio on, he heard the song Comme d'habitude by Claude François, which got stuck in his head. Before leaving France, Anka bought the rights to the song and then set it aside for a few years, unsure of what to do with it.

“Sinatra had teased me for years to write him something and I wasn't up to it, I was too young, I was intimidated,” Anka recalls in an interview with Q’s Tom Power. “So I'm in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau. He calls me up. He says, ‘Kid, I'm here doing a movie. Let's have dinner. And I got to tell you something … I'm quitting show business. I'm tired. The Rat Pack is over … but I'm going to do one more album.’”

WATCH | Paul Anka’s full interview with Tom Power:

Worried he’d lose his last chance to write a song for Sinatra, Anka went back to his home in New York, sat down at his typewriter and thought about the melody he’d heard in France.

“I start writing it as if Frank Sinatra were writing,” he says. “I'm saying things like, ‘ate it up,’ ‘spit it out’ … all that stuff that he would say. And I finished this thing in five hours. I don't know where it came from. Something's going on in the universe. I believe even more in it today. We're all here, connected. Something happened spiritually because I can't tell you how the hell I wrote it.”

Anka called Sinatra to tell him he had a song for him. The very next day, he was in Sinatra’s dressing room in Las Vegas singing it for him.

“He was still Frank Sinatra,” Anka says. “Not jumping up and down but, ‘I like it, I’m going to do it.’ Anyway, two months later, I get a phone call. Record studio in Los Angeles, Frank Sinatra calling. I'm in New York, he takes the phone, he puts it next to a speaker. I hear My Way over the phone for the first time while I'm sitting in New York City, crying. This song was such a hit for him that he stayed 10 more years.”

WATCH | Frank Sinatra performing My Way in 1974:

That day, Anka was moved to tears because he recognized that something had changed.

“I was emotionally so moved, I had never felt the creative process that had culminated in something like that ever in my career,” he says. “The words and the meaning and everything that went into it had such an impact. Maybe The Longest Day came in the same arena, but nothing like My Way, that I knew my life was going to change.”

To this day, at age 84, Anka is still touring and still singing the song, including a recent performance of My Way on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier this month. He says it has “so much more meaning” for him now than it did even just 10 years ago.

“When I get to the line ‘And through it all, when there was doubt / I ate it up and spit it out’ … those are very poignant for me because, you know, as much as the glamour looks great to those on the outside, it's not easy because we've all had our challenges…. But, you know, 84 years, I don't hold anything inside. I'm looking back at a career that's just been so good to me.”

You can watch Anka’s new HBO documentary, Paul Anka: His Way, on Crave in Canada.

WATCH | Official trailer for Paul Anka: His Way: