What songs did Sinatra record?
He did “I Write the Songs” and he made the thing even more complicated because he sang, “I sing the songs,” and, of course, “I Write the Songs” has nothing to do with singing. I fought that all of my career—people thinking that I’m singing about how I wrote every song in the history of the world. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about the spirit of music: I write through this songwriter. It was very clumsily written by Bruce Johnston—but a great idea and a fantastic melody—and Sinatra made it even worse by singing, “I sing the songs that make the whole world sing.” How did you feel about Donna Summer’s cover of “Could It Be Magic”? I loved it! What a great idea. I would never have thought about that. I wrote it as a big ballad, you know, based on that Chopin Prelude [in C Minor]. When they played me Donna’s rendition of it I thought it was just great. Was it true that you didn’t originally want to record “Mandy” because you didn’t write it? True. “I’m a songwriter,” I said to Clive Dav
