“My Way” is a song about a man at the end of his life, looking back and deciding he has no regrets. Frank Sinatra made it his signature. But there’s a version that is far harder to listen to. Elvis Presley recorded it on June 21, 1977 — reading the words off a piece of paper, in a body that was failing him, eight weeks before he died. It was released as a single after his funeral. And the man who wrote those English lyrics had personally told Elvis not to sing it.
Start with where the song actually came from, because it’s nothing as people assume. It began in France as “Comme d’habitude” — “As Usual” — written in 1967 by Jacques Revaux, Gilles Thibaut and the French pop star Claude François, who recorded it. And the original is not about death or defiance at all. It’s a sad little song about a relationship going cold — a couple stuck in routine, going through the motions, love worn down into habit. François is said to have written it thinking about his own failed romance with the singer France Gall.
Then a Canadian singer named Paul Anka heard it on the radio while holidaying in the south of France. He bought the rights and took them back to New York — because he had somebody specific in mind. Frank Sinatra had told Anka he was thinking of retiring, and asked him to write one last song.
How Elvis Presley Made “My Way” His Own
Anka sat down at his typewriter during a thunderstorm at around 3 a.m. and asked himself a single question: what would Frank say if Frank were writing this? Then he typed the first line — the one about the end being near and facing the final curtain — and finished the whole thing by five in the morning. His record label wanted him to keep it for himself. He refused, saying he was too young to do those words justice. Sinatra recorded it, reportedly in one take, and it became the song he is buried under.
Elvis loved it. But when he started performing it in the mid-1970s, Paul Anka told him it wasn’t a song that suited him. Elvis did it anyway. He sang it in 1973 at Aloha from Hawaii, in front of a satellite audience of hundreds of millions.
Then came June 21, 1977, in Rapid City, South Dakota. Elvis was 42 and desperately unwell. Cameras were there filming a television special. And he performed “My Way” — a song about a dying man taking stock of his life — reading the lyrics from a sheet of paper, because he could no longer hold them in his head.
Elvis Presley – My Way (Aloha From Hawaii, Live in Honolulu, 1973)
He was dead eight weeks later, on August 16, 1977.
The single was released on October 3, 1977, alongside the television special, weeks after his funeral. And then something strange happened: it went to number 22 in America — higher than Frank Sinatra’s own version had ever charted — number 2 on the country chart, and number 9 in Britain.
The song has now been covered so many times that it’s often called the most-covered song in history. But this is the one that stops you. A French breakup song, rewritten at 3 a.m. by a man who thought he was too young to sing it, given to Sinatra as a retirement present — and finally sung by Elvis Presley off a sheet of paper, near the end, without knowing how near it was.