Fly Me To The Moon

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My cover of the classic 1954 song, Fly Me To The Moon. I'm singing to a karaoke version playing a wonderful bossa nova arrangement of the song, in a singing style that is breezy, playful, and sensual.

FLY ME TO THE MOON

Fly me to the moon
and let me play among the stars. . .
Let me know what spring is like
on Jupiter and Mars.
In other words,
hold my hand.
In other words,
darling, kiss me.

Fill my heart with song
and let me sing forever more —
Sing as though as sweet a song
was never sung before.
In other words,
please be true.
In other words,
I love you.

[INSTRUMENTAL]

Fill my heart with song
and let me sing forever more —
Sing as though as sweet a song
was never sung before.
In other words,
please be true.
In other words,
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.

LYRICS

Changes to the lyrics — Considering how short the song is, I made some pretty significant changes to the lyrics!

The first one is pretty small. I had always thought the words were "Let me know what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars." When I came to perform the song, I discovered the actual word was "see" rather than "know". But I prefer my version, "knowing" feels like a deeper experience than just "seeing".

The other change to the lyrics is major. The original lyrics go:

Fill my heart with song,
and let me sing forever more.
You are all I long for,
all I worship and adore.

I do believe love often includes an element of worship and adoration. But as a spiritual person, to make that worship and adoration exclusive to a single human being — "You are all I worship and adore" (leaving God out) — is not something I could honestly sing. So, as a songwriter, I began working on finding a replacement for these lyrics.

Those first two lines:

Fill my heart with song,
and let me sing forever more.

have always been my favorite lines in the song, and I have always wished the songwriter had explored the thought a little more in the lyrics. That made it natural for me to look for replacement lyrics that did precisely that:

Fill my heart with song,
and let me sing forever more —
Sing as though as sweet a song
was never sung before.

These words fit perfectly! The idea came from words I had written for one of my songs, The Man With a Thousand Dreams:

A wonder-filled lover,
I discover
you were the song in my heart
when I learned how to sing.

It's not quite the same idea, but it's similar, and it inspired the lyrics I did use.

Strictly speaking, English grammar requires the subjunctive tense:

Sing as though as sweet a song
were never sung before.

But people are using the subjunctive tense increasingly less with each year (it probably will be gone from the English language in another century), and so to my ears, "were" sounds a little stilted compared to "was", so I went with "was".

Also, the structure of the second verse now matches the structure of the first verse: the first four lines being a poetic fantasy on a single theme, followed by "in other words" and a simple direct communication from the singer to his love. The original words messed up that structure a bit by putting a direct communication ("You are all I long for", etc.) in the first four lines before "in other words".

In other words — When Bart Howard originally wrote the song, the title he gave it was "In Other Words". Each of the two verses has a unique structure: a soaring, poetic flight of fancy, then "in other words", then a simple, intimate human expression (holding hands, saying "I love you", etc.). Or you could say, the structure of each verse is: "Here's what I say" (in the language of romance); followed by "Here's what I mean". That structure — and the song implying that "Here's what I mean" is what really matters — is the heart of Howard's song. So I could think of no better way to end the song than to chuck all the high-flying language about spring on Jupiter and Mars (with an average temperature of minus 234 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 145 degrees Celsius, Jupiter is frigid even in its warmest weather!), and end with the singer simply singing what he really means: "I love you" — which he repeats three times, showing he has fallen out of his head and into his heart.

MUSIC

Arrangement — The kinds of arrangements that have accompanied a classic song like this one over the years have run the gamut. The first version of the song, by Kaye Ballard (back in 1954), now sounds stylistically dated and overdone. Joe Harnell created perhaps the most familiar version of the song, an instrumental bossa nova version, in 1962. Another well-known version was Frank Sinatra's 1964 version with Count Basie. As always, Tony Bennett has a wonderfully feeling version (1965).

When I went looking for an arrangement I could sing with, I found Harnell's to be too fast (although that worked fine in his instrumental); and Sinatra's to be too breezy, losing touch with the words and the heart in his jazzy style that felt almost like a caricature of the song. Bennett's has the feeling but not much playfulness. With these songs from The Great American Songbook, I'm always looking to create a version that sounds contemporary, and is very feeling, but also playful. The particular bossa nova arrangement I've chosen hits that sweet spot for Fly Me to the Moon.

Karaoke — I must add a note of gratitude to all the musicians creating high-quality karaoke arrangements, like the one I've chosen here. They are truly amazing, with all kinds of musical nuances that I very much appreciate, delight in, and sing off of. It used to be that, to get this kind of quality, you'd need to hire a group of extraordinary session musicians like the Wrecking Crew to accompany you in the studio. But now that quality is readily available to everyone on YouTube, at least when you want to do a cover of a well-known song.

Harmony — When I sing the words:

Fill my heart with song,
and let me sing forever more.

I've also added a harmony vocal that adds fullness to the section. I got the idea for the harmony from Julie London's version of the song, where a one-note piano harmony line accompanies her voice as she sings those words (in her much faster bossa nova version):

I like this! But I think the vocal harmony sounds even better than the piano harmony:

Voice Imitating Instrument. Frank Sinatra described how he developed his unique singing style by imitating the instruments in his band, particularly the horns: the sound, the phrasing, and the breath patterns. In the following excerpt, just for the fun of it, when I'm singing the word, "true", I'm imitating the sound of the bass notes that immediately follow my singing, so my voice blends into the bass notes seamlessly.