ABSTRACT

Many people are familiar with that great hymn to the ego, the popular song ‘My Way’. In lyrics of what John Sutherland has termed ‘ineffable banality’,1 the song’s narrator is at the end of his life, facing ‘the final curtain’ of his own mortality. Looking back, his life appears to be full of setbacks. There were times, he recalls, when he ‘bit off more than I could chew … ate it up … spit it out … faced it all … and did it my way’. Although innumerable artistes have performed and recorded the song, the Canadian song-writer Paul Anka wrote the English lyrics with Frank Sinatra in mind. The song became irrevocably associated with him, partly because Sinatra had by then (1968) actually lived the kind of life described in the song. Nevertheless, the song had originally sprung from a French collaboration between the flamboyant singer Claude François (who recorded it in 1967), Jacques Revaux and Gilles Thibault, under the title ‘Comme d’habitude’. In fact, the French predecessor is a much more gentle and wistful song, in which the motif ‘comme d’habitude [as usual]’ punctuates a reconstruction of a typical day in the life of a couple in which one partner offers habitual tenderness while the other offers habitual indifference. Thus, whereas the English song is an inflated retrospective, looking back over an entire life, the French original is written entirely in the present and future tenses, tremblingly anticipating the small instances of rejection which lie ahead at different points of the day.