In 1969, Frank Sinatra released “My Way,” much to the irritation of a young David Bowie. Bowie was still in the early stages of his career, and had written English lyrics to the French song “Comme d’habitude.” His version of the song went nowhere, but the lyrics songwriter Paul Anka wrote became a massive success when Sinatra sang them. While Bowie said this angered him, he acknowledged that his own version of the song wasn’t great.

David Bowie wrote lyrics for a song that eventually went to Frank Sinatra

In the 1960s, many songwriters rewrote popular European songs with English lyrics. Bowie hoped to do so with “Comme d’habitude.” He called his version of the song “Even a Fool Learns to Love.”

“There was a time, the laughing time / I took my heart to every party / They’d point my way, how are you today? / Will you make us laugh? Chase our blues away? / Their funny man won’t let them down, no, he’d dance and prance and be their clown / That time, the laughing time, when even a fool learns to love,” he wrote for the first verse, per People.

His version of the song didn’t go far, and he later described it as “god awful” and “terrible.” Still, he felt annoyed when he heard the song playing on the radio with Anka’s lyrics.

David Bowie wrote a response to the Frank Sinatra song

Bowie said that when he first heard “My Way,” he immediately recognized it as his song.

“I sent it back again and I thought that will be the last I hear of that,” he told ABC. “Then I hear it on the radio and I thought ‘That’s that tune, it must be my song … but hang on, these are different lyrics’, and it was Sinatra singing ‘My Way.’”

An irritated Bowie wanted to prove he could write a song like “My Way,” so, in response, he penned “Life on Mars?”

“That really made me angry for so long — for about a year,” Bowie said. “Eventually I thought, ‘I can write something as big as that, and I’ll write one that sounds a bit like it.’ So I did ‘Life On Mars?,’ which was my sort of revenge trip on ‘My Way.’”

Another musician said the two got along well

Despite the rancor over “My Way,” Bowie and Sinatra reportedly got along well. They spent time together at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles. 

“Sinatra had a reputation but I think he just liked to f*** with people, he liked to f*** with what he called the establishment,” studio founder Bruce Robb said in the book David Bowie: The Oral History by Dylan Jones. “When he was amongst other musicians, he was a musician. A singer. And there were so many similarities between him and David. They were inquisitive about one another, and they were intrigued.”

Because of the mutual interest, Robb set up a dinner between the two artists. 

“Sinatra had an Italian restaurant he liked up near Robertson and Beverly, so we booked them a table there,” he said. “They came back to the studio in Sinatra’s limo and at that point it was pretty obvious that they were becoming fast friends. There was a good deal of respect. Sinatra expected that kind of respect, because he was one of our first musical superstars. He didn’t know who David was, but after meeting him, they got on. They visited each other’s sessions.”

Robb described them as “kindred spirits.”