Seth MacFarlane has built an empire with his voice. Most people know him as the creator and star of long-running animated comedies like Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show, as well as the writer-director behind Ted, A Million Ways to Die in the West, and The Orville. He has won multiple Emmys for voicing a multitude of characters on the programs he’s developed, and he’s known as a gifted actor.

What’s less widely known — even among his most dedicated fans — is that MacFarlane is also one of today’s most talented traditional pop vocalists. His musical career, which leans heavily on the Great American Songbook, has earned him five Grammy nominations, including several in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category. His latest release, Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements, may be the most exciting of his nine full-lengths due to the story behind its creation.

While MacFarlane has spent over a decade reviving the stylings of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and their contemporaries, Lush Life stands apart and sounds quite different. It’s not just another tribute to Sinatra, though even that would have been welcome, given MacFarlane’s skill. MacFarlane was granted access to original arrangements written for Sinatra himself, but which, for one reason or another, were never recorded or released. In many cases, these orchestrations have been sitting in boxes for decades, waiting to be discovered and appreciated.

“When I got the offer from Tina Sinatra to acquire the library of charts,” MacFarlane explained during a recent interview, “we found a lot of orchestrations and in some cases, whole songs that [Sinatra]

never recorded for one reason or another.” One standout is “Flying Down to Rio,” which was initially arranged for the crooner’s Come Fly With Me album before being shelved. “That’s kind of something that somebody ought to record at some point,” he adds, “because it was written by Billy May, one of the greatest arrangers of popular song ever.”

That’s exactly what MacFarlane has done. Working with top-tier musicians and staying faithful to the original arrangements, Lush Life brings these forgotten songs to life for the first time. These new recordings are performed in MacFarlane’s signature smooth, deep voice, which lends itself perfectly to this space – but even in Sinatra’s shadow, the TV star manages to make these decades-old tunes his own. “You really do have to put your own stamp on it, because there is no recording that exists,” he says. “But at the same time, you have the fun and the privilege of playing in that Nelson Riddle/Billy May playground.”

The result is a fantastic collection of recordings, not just for Sinatra geek MacFarlane, but for anyone who cares deeply about this kind of music. Fans of the Great American Songbook will be delighted as delighted as ever to hear new takes on the classics, and Sinatra devotees in particular should be intrigued by the idea that there’s still more of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ catalog left to explore.

I've loved turning people on to your singing throughout the years. I always love dropping in, "He's got a great voice," and I've actually played things for people in the past, so I was very happy to hear this album, which is phenomenal.

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.

This is more specific than some of your past records, so tell me about the genesis of this Frank Sinatra tribute.

I didn't set out to do a Sinatra album. If anything, I try to stay away from his material, because you're just not going to outdo anything that he's done. I try to take lessons from the way he approached a song and the way he approached an arrangement when I'm recording something new. But in this instance, when I got the offer from Tina Sinatra to acquire the library of charts, we found a lot of orchestrations and in some cases, whole songs that he never recorded for one reason or another, so that was a very different story.

You take something like "Flying Down to Rio," which was written for the Come Fly With Me album and cut, and then just left in a box somewhere for seven decades. That's kind of something that somebody ought to record at some point, because it was written by Billy May, one of the greatest arrangers of popular song ever. And obviously, there are a number of charts by Nelson Riddle, who is probably the best of the best, and it would've been a crime not to put these things down on tape.

Well, I'm glad someone did, and that it was you. I'm shocked that after all this time, there are still Sinatra compositions that were never recorded, or arrangements that were abandoned. Why do you think these have been left alone for so long?

I think it's probably a different reason for each individual chart. I mean, for "Flying Down to Rio," it may have just been cut for time or something. "How Did She Look?" was supposed to be included on the Only the Lonely album, and I don't know, because it's a fantastic chart. In some cases, I think it's superior to maybe one or two of the charts that were actually on that record — even though that record is just about flawless as far as I'm concerned.

I think it's just the quantity of great music that you had back then made it almost... I don't want to use the word "disposable," but you could be a little fast and loose with what you cut because you always knew there was something else great coming down the line. It's in many ways similar to why we lost all those classic MGM charts. All the orchestral scores for The Wizard of Oz or Singin' in the Rain or any of those great musicals from the '40s are gone. They were bulldozed to make a parking lot somewhere. And the thinking was, "Well, we'll always have this." That kind of high musicality will always exist. And of course, it doesn't. It's just gone. So putting aside some of these songs because there was so much to choose from... that just doesn't exist anymore.

When you acquired all of this content, you must have dug through... I mean, there must be so much more than the 12 songs you included on this.

Yeah. We were under some pressure, for reasons I can't remember now, to reduce the number to 12. I think that's one of those weird modern music industry things that I don't really understand. We had more that were prepped for this album. But even beyond that, there are others that we didn't even touch yet in the archives that are also ripe to be recorded.

Charlie Pignone, who's our guru at Sinatra Enterprises and knows these archives better than anybody, says there are probably another two albums' worth of unrecorded material in there. So our process of digging is certainly not complete. We plan to do more of it.

Were there any arrangements, as you picked these up and chose your 12, that were particularly tough to make come to life after so much time?

A lot of it was figuring out what the tempo was. That’s something that really can’t be quantified. I mean, I guess you can put a metronome number at the top of your chart, but in most cases, that wasn’t done. It was something left to dynamic indication — “moderate swing,” “uptempo” — and that could mean any number of things.

So we had to guess, based on what we knew of each arranger’s style and other work they had done. And by this point, both Joel and I, and John Wilson our conductor, we’re very familiar with all of these arrangers. So we were pretty confident that our guesses weren’t too far off, and hopefully they were fairly accurate.

Beyond that, the only other work done was lyrical. For "Arrivederci, Roma," there was an Italian verse — the English refrain was already written, had been sung by many artists — but the verse was all in Italian. I don’t know that Sinatra would’ve sung it that way. I remember Dean Martin singing a lot in Italian, but not Sinatra. And I certainly didn’t want to subject anyone to my attempt.

So we had it translated, and I wrote a new lyric for that verse based on the translated content. Hopefully, it blends well with the lyrics that already exist. That was one of the few bits of writing I had to do.

There are a couple of lyrics in "Hurry Home" and a couple in "Give Me the Simple Life" that I rewrote because I was damn sure they were the reason Sinatra didn’t want to sing those songs. They were just absurd — so quaint that even in 1910 you might not get away with them.

But that was all part of the process – understanding what they would have done. Changes are always made on the day when you’re in the studio. You mess around until everything’s just right. In those cases, I imagine Sinatra would’ve brought in someone like Sammy Cahn or Johnny Mercer to help him tweak things. But again, it’s all guesswork.

But what a great thought exercise — and what a great time for someone like you, who's such a fan of this space, to nerd out. "What would Sinatra do? What would Mercer do?"

Yeah, it’s fun, and it’s work, and it’s pressure like anything else. Even writing a lyric for something like Family Guy, we hold ourselves to a rigid standard. We don’t get to cheat. We don’t get to use half rhymes, which I’ve always hated. Either it rhymes or it doesn’t.

But with something like this, where you’re blending with lyrics written when the art form was in the hands of people like Oscar Hammerstein and Cole Porter and Alan Jay Lerner... there's a lot of pressure to really bring it. They were the best of the best.

Throughout your musical career, it’s been all traditional American songbook. You’ve really championed that music, those names you just mentioned. But when you come to a project like this — Sinatra, these great writers — how do you honor that and still put your stamp on it?

It’s a little of both. We’ve done eight studio albums at this point, and I always look for songs that haven’t been sung often by a lot of people, just because it’s more interesting. That’s what interested me about what Sinatra did. He took songs from the ’20s and ’30s that had been, if not forgotten, then certainly sidelined, and revitalized them.

So that’s always been my approach. I don’t want to sing “My Way” or “Fly Me to the Moon.” I want to sing “Green Dolphin Street,” or “Ain’t Got a Dime to My Name” from Road to Morocco. I want to find songs that maybe someone like Frank would have interpreted if he’d gotten around to them.

So with this, the good thing is, you’re not recreating something iconic. These songs were never recorded. You have to put your own stamp on them. But at the same time, you get to play in the Nelson Riddle/Billy May sandbox, and hear their signature voices as arrangers.

It’s like, if you’re a Beatles fan and you find a lost Lennon/McCartney song — something unfinished but clearly theirs — and now you get to be the first to interpret it. That’s the feeling.

What is it about this era, the Great American Songbook, that fascinates you?

There’s so much of it, and it’s so enduring. It’s the purest form of songwriting. Most decades have their musical signatures: “Oh, that’s disco,” “That’s rock,” “That’s hip-hop.” But with these songs, you can’t do that.

Take “Blue Moon” or “The Sound of Music” — what are they? Jazz? Classical? Pop? No. They're just melody. Pure, simple, beautiful melody that can be recorded in any style.

They were written to be taken home and played by anyone with a piano. Structurally and melodically, it’s songwriting in its purest form. And it’s hard. You don’t see people doing that now. Try to find someone who’s written “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the past 30 years. We’ve tried.

It was an era of such high musicality, and we didn’t realize how rare it was. None of it is kitsch. You look back at old TV shows you thought were great and now see they were... not. But you watch The Sopranos today? Still high art.

There was just something deeper behind this music. Irving Berlin writing a song felt like more than just product. That’s my theory — and it might be naive — but that’s how I see it.

But we also have hindsight. We can look back 70 years and say, “Oh, those songs stood the test of time.” Give it 20 or 30 more and let’s see how some of the garbage from the ’80s holds up.

But I think we’re already there. The ’80s was 40 years ago.

Right — 40 years!

Even by then, we knew older songs were classics. I love ’80s music, but I don’t think it stands the test of time the same way. There’s fun stuff, but a lot of kitsch.

I think another way to look at it is, we love ’80s music because we were there. It’s tied to our lives. That’s why I’ll listen to “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car.” It gets a pass because of the memory. But that’s the difference – these older songs don’t need that. You hear “Heather on the Hill” or “Laura” and they move you regardless of when you were born. It doesn’t take production or nostalgia, they just hold up.

I was struck as I listened by the lushness of these orchestrations. It's so beautiful. Can you tell me about you needing that many musicians?

Well, again, that was something that was common back then. You recorded a pop album with that size ensemble if you wanted to, and many people did. Most of Sinatra's albums were somewhere in that range in terms of the orchestra size.

So to us, it's unusual because today, things are more economical. You’ve got your guitarist, your keyboardist, your bassist, your percussionist — maybe a couple more — and that’s your band. Then it’s all post-work. You just don’t see these large ensembles anymore.

I love it. It’s special. And there’s nothing like that sound, especially when it’s in the hands of arrangers who really know how to write for those ensembles like these guys did. Nelson Riddle was a master. Don Costa was a master. These guys just really knew how to bring the most out of an ensemble.

And comparatively, these aren't symphony-sized ensembles. We're not talking about 100 players. Sometimes it's 50 or 55, and even back then it might’ve been 35. But that still meant you had a full string section, a brass section, a woodwind section. You could paint with all those different colors and bring a lot of variety to even a single song.

There's just nothing like being in the room with an orchestra. It really is the best thing in the world.

You are famously very busy, you've got a lot going on. But do you ever wish you could take these songs out on the road? And would that even be feasible with that large of an orchestra?

What you do is you work with local ensembles. I’ve performed with the San Francisco Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Philadelphia Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Boston Pops, the Cincinnati Symphony. Every one of those is a phenomenal ensemble, ready to play this stuff.

You bring your rhythm section with you — maybe seven people. Your pianist, drummer, bassist, guitarist, maybe a lead trombone, lead woodwind, lead trumpet. That’s really it. Everything else is filled in by the orchestra you work with locally.

It would definitely be fun to do that at some point, but truthfully, it wasn’t something that was very common back then. When someone like Nat King Cole or Sinatra or Dean Martin released an album, they weren’t out on tour supporting it the way a pop star is now.

It was about the recording. They might do some live shows — there are great recordings of the Rat Pack at the Sands, for instance — but it wasn’t like they were touring heavily. That was more of an afterthought, like, "Hey, we’re filming a movie in Vegas, might as well do a show." They were already onto the next album.

In some ways, I kind of like that model. You're investing in what you’re making in the studio, and then once it's out there, it’s for people to discover, and you move on.

People know you from a lot of different things, obviously — TV, film, comedy – but you put so much time and care into these albums, and it's clear how much you love and understand this music. Do you feel like you're still introducing this side of yourself to the public? And is that kind of strange, given how established you are in other areas?

Look, it’s just a fact of entertainment – if you establish yourself as a musician first, like Will Smith or someone like that, and then move into acting or directing, you’re usually granted a kind of freedom. People accept that transition.

But it doesn’t work the other way around. For some reason, if you’re a writer or an actor who then decides, "Hey, I’d like to try making music," there’s a lot more skepticism. I don’t know why that is, but it’s real.

That said, I’m incredibly gratified by the reception we’ve gotten. I think we’ve had four or five Grammy nominations for these records, which tells me that, yeah, we’re still introducing people to this side of what I do — but we’ve managed to make more headway than a lot of folks do when crossing over.

Overall, it’s definitely a lot harder to go from something like acting or animation into music than the reverse, and I see that all the time across the history of entertainment.

You're a five-time Grammy nominee at this point, so you feel like you've gotten farther, but you're right. In my lifetime, Lady Gaga is an Oscar-nominated actress, Ariana Grande is an Oscar-nominated actress... but how many people were listening to an actor’s albums?

Those are both great examples. There's an allowance for it from one side but not the other, with exceptions. I think people like Jared Leto have earned some genuine respect from parts of the music business. There are exceptions, but there’s just no comparison.

Quantitatively, if you're a musician getting into the world of acting, there's a lot more allowance — from both the press and the public — than there is the other way around. If you're Tom Hanks and you want to get into music, it's going to be a much more uphill climb than if you're Lady Gaga trying to become a great actor.

Yeah, but you’ve gotta love Tom’s son's rap career.

Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. You're missing out on that one. Have you heard Jeff Goldblum's music?

I haven't. But first of all, he's a genuinely talented musician. And I think what he's doing is... in some ways it's like, you look at someone like Steve Martin, who is genuinely talented with the banjo. These guys aren't trying to become pop stars. They're just trying to make music. And if you respond to it, great. If you don't, fine.

I think people can recognize in both of those individuals that there's an artist there. Someone who's just doing it because they love it, not because they're trying to become something else.

Do you have a favorite Sinatra album?

Say it one more time? Yeah, it’s breaking up a little—sorry. You want to try FaceTime? It’s going to work a lot better.

Favorite Sinatra album? Only the Lonely. His ballad albums are my favorites because I feel like that’s where he was really doing 150%. I mean, he was always giving 150%, but you can tell that’s where his heart really was.

His arrangers, too. As great as something like Songs for Swingin’ Lovers is, there’s no question when you listen to In the Wee Small Hours or Only the Lonely or any of those ballad albums, Nelson Riddle is giving you all of his art in a different way.