My Way: The Anthem of a Life Lived on One’s Own Terms (That Sinatra Grew to Dislike)

By Dan Cohen · Published 2026-06-27

My Way, indelibly associated with Frank Sinatra’s 1969 recording, has a more international and improbable origin than its all-American swagger suggests. The melody comes from a French song, “Comme d’habitude”; Paul Anka acquired the rights and wrote entirely new English lyrics — tailored specifically for Sinatra and the late-career, looking-back persona he’d earned. The grandest statement of American self-determination was, underneath, a French tune in a new suit.

A life summed up

What Anka wrote was a deathbed-adjacent reckoning: a man at the end of the road surveying his life and declaring that, regrets and all, he did it on his own terms. That stance — unbowed, unapologetic, defiantly individual — is exactly why it became a funeral staple, a karaoke titan, and shorthand for a whole philosophy of living.

The singer’s discomfort

Here’s the wrinkle most fans don’t know: Sinatra himself reportedly came to dislike it, finding it self-aggrandizing and a touch boastful. The definitive performer of the ultimate self-celebration was privately uneasy with how much it celebrated the self. That tension — a humble man inside a grandiose anthem — only makes the recording more interesting.

What it measures like

On our scale it’s a stately build — beginning quiet and reflective, swelling to a big, brassy, intense finish, the orchestration rising with the resolve. Full profile on its song page.

My Way (1969) sets Paul Anka’s English lyric to the melody of the French song “Comme d’habitude”; it was written with Frank Sinatra in mind. Reports of Sinatra’s later distaste for it are widely documented. No lyrics are reproduced.