Michael Bolton chats to I Like Music

ILM: For years you've kept a list of dream projects and an album of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra, was at the top. Now that you've done that, what other dream projects do you have up your sleeve?

MICHAEL: The dream aspect of it was really the big band project and energy. I've recorded classics and standards before, but not in this format of fresh…. the energy level I was looking for would only come from live brass and the luxurious part of it, which was the live string section, was certainly something that sonically is just a beautiful amazing thing. No matter how great we get with digital formats of instrumentation, of samples… the absolute best that they've come up with, nothing really quite duplicates the real thing.

You can use samples and cut them in to the track and give the texture and feel and sound of live instruments, but there really is nothing when you're featuring them that will really compare to the real thing. So that was part of fulfilling a dream.

The Sinatra element actually came later after I'd listened to literally hundreds of songs and I'd whittled them down to fifteen or so, and I couldn't help but notice the obvious single common denominator, which was that Sinatra had made most of the ones that I was certain about, he was the one who had recorded the definitive version of them. They were recorded well to say the least by people like Billy Holiday before Frank, all the way through to Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong who recorded some of them. There were a lot of great and very different versions out there, but the man who made them household around the world was Frank. Not just because they were hits, but his delivery and arrangements of them are now being played at the southern most tip of South America in Buenos Aires you can hear his versions playing in a café, you can hear them in Hong Kong and all throughout Europe and you can hear them in the States all the time.
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