The record in context

In 1977, Martin Scorsese made a film called New York, New York, a big, bruised valentine to the big-band era starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. John Kander and Fred Ebb — the Broadway team behind Cabaret and Chicago — wrote the title song for Minnelli to sing in the picture. It is a good song in the film. It is a great song everywhere else, because two years later Frank Sinatra got hold of it and turned it into something the movie could never contain: the unofficial anthem of the city itself, played at every Yankees win, every New Year’s Eve, every moment New York needs to remind itself what it is.

Sinatra recorded it in 1979 for his triple album Trilogy: Past Present Future, and the story goes that he had to be talked into it — the song was written for a woman, in a woman’s key, for a specific film moment. None of that mattered once he sang it. He took Kander’s strutting melody and Ebb’s lyric — “Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leavin’ today” — and sang it the way only a Hoboken kid who conquered Manhattan could: as autobiography. This was not a man pretending to love New York. This was a man who had lived the lyric, block by block, from the Ferry to the Copa to the top of the Waldorf. The single reached the Top 40, but chart positions miss the point. Within a few years, the song belonged to the city the way “My Way” belonged to Sinatra — which is to say, completely, and forever.

The delicious irony is that the film flopped. Scorsese’s New York, New York lost money and confused audiences, and today it is remembered — when it is remembered at all — as the movie that accidentally produced one of the most famous songs of the twentieth century. Minnelli’s version is lovely and theatrical. Sinatra’s is elemental. He changed the key, he changed the tempo, he changed the meaning: in his hands it stopped being a show tune and became a declaration of intent. Every New Year’s Eve in Times Square, when the ball drops and the song plays, nobody is thinking about Robert De Niro. They are thinking about Frank.

Listen closely

Start with the opening vamp — those bright, stabbing brass figures — and notice how Sinatra waits. He doesn’t rush the entrance. “Start spreadin’ the news” arrives with the ease of a man who has all the time in the world, which is exactly the point: the song is about wanting a city so badly you can taste it, and Sinatra sings it like a man who already owns it. Listen to the way he handles “I’m leavin’ today” — the “today” is punched, exhaled, thrown away. It is not a lament. It is a launch.

Then comes the famous climb. “These little-town blues are melting away” — and on “melting,” the voice does exactly what the word says, softening and spreading. But the real moment is the chorus, the part everyone knows: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” Sinatra sings “anywhere” like a challenge, not a hope. The orchestra under him — Don Costa’s arrangement, all brass and swagger — keeps pushing the tempo forward, and Sinatra rides it the way a surfer rides a wave: never ahead, never behind, always exactly on top. That is the whole art in one image. The band roars; the voice stays cool; the combination is unstoppable.

Listen finally to the ending, because Sinatra’s ending is the whole story. He doesn’t fade. He doesn’t soften. He drives the last “New York, New York!” straight through the orchestra and holds it — a held note as civic pride. In concert, this was his closer for the last fifteen years of his career, and he sang it like a man renewing a vow. The lyric says “I want to be a part of it.” By 1979, Frank Sinatra didn’t want to be a part of New York. He was New York — or at least the part of it that believed, against all evidence, that the best is always yet to come.