When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics - I was literally singing before I was talking.
If someone had told me when I was a kid I'd get an ovation from Frank Sinatra! One time, I did a song called 'I Am A Singer', but I rewrote the words for Frank. I was in tears and, when he got up, so was he.
Every week, as an 11-year-old kid, I would tune in to what was really the first American Idol-type program, a radio show called 'Major Bowes' Amateur Hour.' The winning group on the evening of September 8, 1935, was called the Hoboken Four, and their spokesman was Frank Sinatra, then aged 19.
To sing with Frank Sinatra in any capacity at all is overwhelming.
Early '90s, I was big, big into Sinatra. I was in college. I was fascinated.
As an entertainer, Justin Timberlake has learned from the past. He can cradle a mic stand like Elvis Presley, move like Michael Jackson, and swoon like Frank Sinatra.
The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
Mick Jagger's fans bought records with their allowances. Sinatra's people bought them out of wages.
The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of them look like droopy-eyed armless children.
I was a pop-music junkie. My parents were into Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. They weren't too excited when I had Aretha or the Stones pumping.