“Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane on his other love: Sinatra

Even if you’re not a regular “Family Guy” viewer, you’ve probably heard the show’s iconic theme song. The song is largely the creation of Seth MacFarlane, whose love of animation may only be rivaled by his love for big, jazzy tunes. In fact, he’s even got a semi-regular gig at the Vibrato Grill Jazz Club in Bel Air, Calif., singing songs from the Great American Songbook.

But one thing he doesn’t seem to love, considering he’s lived his life in the public eye, is a certain kind of attention. He says sometimes getting in front of a crowd (or even our “Sunday Morning” cameras) doesn’t quite come naturally.

He is, he admits, an introvert. “Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. I don’t even wanna be here!” he said.

In fact, he says he sometimes has to resort to liquid courage. “I think I had like four scotches before I walked out on stage at the Oscars,” he said, referring to his hosting gig in 2013. “I do get, yeah, I definitely get nervous.”

You might know MacFarlane as the voice of Peter, Brian Griffin and Stewie on the show “Family Guy” that he created more than two decades ago. In 1999, MacFarlane became the youngest showrunner in Hollywood history. And less than a decade later, with three network shows on the air, he became Hollywood’s highest-paid writer-producer.

But back in college, MacFarlane’s first love was singing. “My sister, at the time, was going to the Boston Conservatory of Music for musical theater,” he said. “She has a beautiful singing voice. And I had got it into my head that I was going to maybe go to grad school for musical theater as well. So, I applied and got in. And I was all set to go to their grad program. And I got this offer from Hanna-Barbera to come do an animated short for a series that they were developing. And so, I just had to take it, moved out to California. But there was an instant there where I could have kind of diverged into a completely different career and never, you know, never even thought about something called ‘Family Guy.'”

MacFarlane loved film scores as a college student and to this day he uses a live orchestra to score his TV shows.  “It’s the one part that I don’t really understand, even to this day,” he said. “There’s still something mysterious about how a composer sits down to write, and then a couple weeks later walks in front of an orchestra, plops down these charts, and they all play it. And you hear this insane, magical sound. That still eludes me.”

Frank Sinatra Jr, and Stewie and Brian (Seth MacFarlane), perform “At Frank Sinatra’s Restaurant (Jr.)” from “Family Guy”:

For his latest album, “Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements” (out this week), MacFarlane and Joel McNeely (his composer for “American Dad!” and “The Orville”) combed through the Sinatra Family archives for songs that had been arranged for Sinatra but never fully recorded. For McNeely, the process was almost like speaking to the ghosts of the greatest arrangers in popular music, the men who helped make Sinatra’s voice shine.

McNeely showed an arrangement by Nelson Riddle: “This was the first one we read when we had a sight-reading session at Fox. We got an orchestra together just to see what was there, you know, because there was nothing to reference. But all this time later, these little black pencil dots on paper, there’s his voice brought back to life. I mean, it was chilling.”

So, what exactly does an arranger do? “Frank Sinatra, there’s a recording of him saying that the arrangers could be in a sense a recording secretary, taking the vision of the artist and interpreting it into this,” McNeely said.

MacFarlane said, “You take a song like ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ for example, which I think was originally a ballad. [Here], it’s the same song, but it’s a completely different animal.”

McNeely says MacFarlane is preserving the essential legacy of the American Songbook through his recordings and the music of the TV show “Family Guy.” But what about the legacy of “Family Guy”? MacFarlane has some thoughts: “When I started the show – this is the conversation that, like, tortures me at night! – when I started the show, my attitude was, it doesn’t matter, none of it matters. It’s like, It’s funny? Let’s do it.

“And the older I’ve gotten, I look back at shows that we’ve done, and I’m like, Gosh, I guess it’s a little more complicated than that, isn’t it? Comedy and jokes do have an impact. I have to figure out a way to maintain what the show is, and maintain the thing that people love. But at the same time, recognize that, like, all right, I am analyzing it now in a different way than I did when I was younger.”

If it’s true that you’re nobody ’till somebody loves you, then thanks to “Family Guy”‘s legion of fans, Seth MacFarlane, it turns out, is a very big somebody indeed.

Seth MacFarlane performs “Give Me the Simple Life,” from his album “Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements”:

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated that Joel McNeely was the composer and arranger for “Family Guy.” He was in fact the composer for two other Seth MacFarlane series, “American Dad!” and “The Orville.” 

      
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Story produced by Anthony Laudato. Editor: Remington Korper.