A Candid Conversation With Seth MacFarlane
The bar at the Four Seasons Hotel on 57th Street, late on a Friday afternoon. Enter Seth MacFarlane, tall, forever fresh-faced, and smiling, here to talk about Lush Life, his new album of Sinatra songs created from the vault of Sinatra orchestral arrangements MacFarlane now owns. (Other topics in the MacFarlane universe will be discussed—but also what, exactly, an orchestral arrangement is.)
If you know MacFarlane for the things most people know him for, you may be wondering if this album is from a different Seth MacFarlane. It is not. It’s the same Seth MacFarlane who created Family Guy, the animated series that has been on the air for 25 years. And American Dad, the animated series that’s been on for 20 years. And both Ted movies (and the Ted TV series, season two of which is coming this year), and, as producer, the Naked Gun remake starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson coming to theaters August 1.
Music has never been a hobby for him—he takes it as seriously as he does everything he does—but it does tend to get upstaged by the turd jokes. (He will be performing songs from Lush Life live at the Venetian in Las Vegas July 3-5.)
Last night at the offices of the record company over manhattans and martinis, a few dozen important people heard the album for the first time: MacFarlane’s smooth baritone singing over rich orchestral music, a collection of songs that sounded both familiar and entirely new.
A uniformed waiter arrives.
ESQ: A manhattan, please.
WAITER: And for you, sir?
SETH MACFARLANE: Earl grey tea for me, please.
ESQ [after an embarrassed pause]: Shoot, I got a manhattan because it seemed thematically appropriate, with the Sinatra album. I can switch—
SM: No no, you have a manhattan! It is appropriate. I just can’t. I was drinking enough this week.
ESQ: Okay. [Looking around, eager to change the subject.] This place is red!
SM: It is. Really red.
ESQ: This project, Lush Life, sounds a little crazy, in the best way: Seth MacFarlane, creator of The Family Guy, singing from Sinatra’s catalog to orchestral arrangements no one has ever heard. Who knew that you had bought the rights to—how do I phrase it? Sinatra…songs?
SM: Yeah, it’s not the rights to his catalog. We acquired the library of arrangements.
ESQ: Arrangements.
SM: An arrangement is the orchestral interpretation of a song. “Fly Me to the Moon” is a good example. It was initially recorded as a ballad. Then it was arranged, I think by Quincy Jones, for Sinatra later in the game, and that’s the version we all know—an up-tempo arrangement as opposed to a ballad arrangement. A new arrangement can make a song seem like a completely different song.
ESQ: Like an unplugged version versus the electric version?
SM: Yeah. Well. Kind of.
ESQ: And these arrangers you worked with on Lush Life—they’re the mountaintop of arrangers, yes?
SM: Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Don Costa. They’re just the best that ever were.
WAITER: Earl grey tea. And…a manhattan.
SM: There are also, in this library we acquired, whole songs that have never been heard. And what’s kind of seismic about that is, take a song everybody knows, like “The Sound of Music” or “Edelweiss” or “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Try to write that song today. It’s impossible. It doesn’t exist. You had composers like Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart and Johnny Mercer and Irving Berlin and all these writers who were talking to each other and hearing each other’s work and trying to outdo each other. But the art of simple, pure songwriting that defies genre has vanished. I have hunted and hunted for people that can do it. So what’s interesting about Lush Life is that we’re picking up the scraps of something that people took for granted at one point. Nobody’s gonna write a “Moon River” again.
MacFarlane on the set of Ted 2 with Mark Wahlberg.
ESQ: A lot of your ideas over the years probably looked a little bonkers on paper.
SM: Ted was the hardest sell. Even Cosmos was an easier sell than Ted.
ESQ: Even after all your success with Family Guy?
SM: Ted was just too weird. I was asked, can you do it as a PG movie? I was asked, can you do it with a puppet?
ESQ: What was your pitch?
SM: Essentially the script. It wasn’t too different than the final movie. It was just getting someone to take a gamble because a CGI bear who looks photorealistic was not going to be cheap. Plus, at that time, the idea of R-rated comedies returning to the forefront was still on its way in. People are gonna hate me for this, but I think the 90s was a dead zone for great comedic films. There are exceptions. But everything was PG or PG-13. Everything was soft-shelled and innocuous. None of my favorite comedies are from the 90s. Everyone was scared. Planes, Trains and Automobiles or Blues Brothers or Caddyshack or Animal House were just gone. Old School in the early 2000s reopened that door, and then Judd Apatow took the baton.
ESQ: If a listener only finds his way to Lush Life because, “Oh, my God, I love Family Guy!” would that bother you?
SM: You know, whatever gets them in the door. Will Smith can go from being a pop rapper to being an actor, and people will allow it. Streisand was a great singer, and then an actor. Or Sinatra. There’s an allowance for people who are in music to venture into other disciplines, but the reverse is almost never true. It’s an interesting double standard. There have been exceptions, but if you’re, I don’t know, Corey Feldman and you decide you want to get into music, people are going to give you a hard time.
ESQ: Your previous albums have been great, too.
SM: Yeah, look, at this point we've had five Grammy nominations, so they’re paying attention. But it’s still secondary to that thing that is what people know me for.
ESQ: Why do you love this kind of music? The old songs?
SM: I was in a church choir as a kid, if you can believe that. My parents felt like music was important. And the choir conductor did local productions on the side. At the beginning, it was mostly Gilbert and Sullivan, things like that.
MANAGER: I’m sorry to interrupt, but is the music too loud? Does it need to be lowered a little bit, or is it okay?
MacFarlane is perhaps best known for creating Family Guy, which is mostly a blessing, he says, though it can present challenges in getting other projects greenlit.
ESQ: I think I’m okay, with the recording. But wow, thank you very much for asking.
SM: They know this ain’t Rolling Stone.
ESQ: So: Gilbert and Sullivan.
SM: Yeah, you know: The Sorcerer. HMS Pinafore. The Mikado, back when a bunch of white kids could be in The Mikado and people just went along with it. So I was introduced to classical music from a pretty young age. I loved film scores.
ESQ: Ever try to start a band in high school, the way musical kids do?
SM: Never tried to start a band because as a singer, you could always find a guitarist or a drummer, but try finding a fucking viola player. You can’t fake this music. Not to take anything away from rock, but you can get together in a garage and form a rock band. You can’t do that with this kind of music.
ESQ: You obviously have a gift for doing voices and doing impressions. But on this album, it’s not like you’re not doing an impression of Sinatra. You’re you.
SM: If anything, I sound like my dad. He has an extraordinary singing voice. He auditioned for hair in the 70s. He got an offer to come on the Tonight show and sing—he was a folk singer—and he turned it down because he was a hippie and I guess didn’t want to sell out to the man.
ESQ: In the recording studio, were you wondering, do I sound like Sinatra? Am I supposed to sound like Sinatra?
SM: To me, from a vocal standpoint, Sinatra was our Mozart. When he sang a song, he was telling a story. I have a feeling everybody who does this kind of music wonders if people will think they’re trying to sound like him. It’s like singing a 90s ballad and hoping to God you don’t sound like Eddie Vedder.
ESQ: You’ve always been religious about—
SM: That’s a word rarely used to describe me, but sure. Yours in Christ!
ESQ: —about using full orchestras to score everything you do. Has anyone ever said, Seth, you know, Family Guy is an animated show, we don’t really need a woodwind section.
SM: No one said that because The Simpsons established it before we even got to the table. For whatever reason—and thank God for it—they were using a live orchestra since they started in the 80s. And the effect is that if an audience is watching a show and hearing live orchestral music, even if they don’t know that what they’re hearing is acoustic and not electronic, on a subconscious level I think they are hearing it—the air in the room, they’re hearing the players, and it somehow makes the show seem more…important. That orchestra on The Simpsons was one of many things that made it feel like, I’m not watching a kids show. Even when I was a kid watching G.I. Joe and Thundercats in the afternoon, it’s orchestral music and it’s really well written. And that was kind of the last of that. The 90s came around and somebody decided, we can do this with synths.
ESQ: You’ve talked about how detail-oriented Sinatra was. Controlling, even. Were you that guy on this?
SM: To some extent, yeah—on everything that I do. But I was also surrounded by people I trust implicitly. And we have people like Chuck Berghoffer, who was Sinatra’s bassist, who’s 87. He plays the bass and you just hear a big fat round sound that gives you a foundation. Larry Koontz, who as a guitarist is one of the best soloists out there. Tom Rainier, who plays piano like it’s liquid. Pete Erkine, who’s the greatest living jazz drummer. You cast an orchestra the same way you cast a TV show or a film.
MacFarlane on stage with the rest of the cast of Family Guy.
ESQ: The similarity I see between Lush Life and your other work is that it’s unusual, which usually means harder to pull off, and yet you got it made anyway.
SM: It’s just persistence, particularly if it’s outside what people know you for. I’m pitching a movie right now that’s very different than what I’ve done in the past, and I’m encountering a little bit of, “Really? There’s no dick jokes in it? Well, how are we gonna sell it?”
ESQ: I think you’re more than the dick-joke guy, but you have made some great ones.
SM: They pay the bills.
ESQ: What interests me is the more sophisticated, risky jokes you’ve made. I think of the time on Family Guy when they go to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, I think, and there’s a Black family walking by, and Stewie says, “By the way, you’re welcome.”
SM: That’s a joke that only Stewie gets away with. If you’re Kevin James on King of Queens doing that joke, it’s going to have a different vibe.
ESQ: You do get away with some stuff.
SM: We do. But I also feel like there’s a lot of jokes on Family Guy that guys who look like you and me think will be offensive, and they’re just not. And you have a vetting process in the table read, where you read through the script, and it’s a pretty eclectic room. If something is over the line, believe me, they will tell you. There will be a groan in that room. Or there’ll be dead silence, which is even worse.
ESQ: Does that happen?
SM: Oh, yeah. Those are the jokes that you don’t see. Even if a joke somehow squeaks through, then the broadcast standards will say, guys, come on. So there’s a pretty good barometer that we can trust. Nothing’s going to get on the air that’s so egregious that it can’t be defensible.
ESQ: Of the jokes that haven't made it, were most of them for your brain?
SM: No, they’re pretty across the board. And some of the ones that haven’t made it, you look back and you’re like, Yeah, that was funny at 2 in the morning in the writers’ room and we were trying to finish the script, but I would have a tough time defending that joke if asked to.
ESQ: How do you want people see you: there’s the shit-joke guy, the Sinatra guy…
SM: As much as I try at times to shed the Family Guy association—
ESQ: Do you?
SM: Well, like this movie I’m pitching right now is an adaptation of an old musical from the '40s. And it’s very earnest, much more in line with the album that I just did. I’m not walking in there and pitching Ted 3, so there’s a little bit of extra pushing of the boulder up the hill because it’s not so simple for somebody to market because it’s me, and there’s an expectation. That gets frustrating. But that frustration is so eclipsed by the fact that—if you can have one thing in your career that not only defines you but sustains for decades, you shouldn’t complain. When I’m shooting a TV show or a movie and I gotta drag my ass in on the weekend to record Family Guy or American Dad, I’m exhausted because I’ve worked a ninety-hour week, yeah, I’ll bitch and moan, but at the end of the day, there will never be a point where I regret that association because, God, it has opened so many doors.
ESQ: How many hours in a week are you in a studio recording voices?
SM: If three shows are going at once, you can record three hours of material a week, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But it’s a lot of airtime for characters like Stan and characters like Quagmire, characters that were never designed to be healthy, and it’s just not great for your vocal cords. You’re at war with this other job of singing.
ESQ: What do you do? You drink tea, eat honey?
SM: Tea and honey doesn't work. It’s all bullshit. I’m sure there are people who work with their voices who would tell you differently. I have never found anything that works other than a night’s sleep. If your voice isn’t cooperating, no amount of tea you drink is going to suddenly make it better. You know what does work sometimes? Booze.
ESQ: Booze!
SM: You have problems with your voice? A little bit of whiskey. I’ve had more than one professional vocalist—names you would instantly recognize—say, I have some whiskey before I go on stage. They say it just loosens up the vocal cords.
ESQ: I feel like if I was a singer I’d used that as justification for, like, three whiskeys.
SM: Well, during the show you could do that. That’s what I do. That’s probably not great. Works for me, though.
ESQ: You said you’re drawn to the moodier, depressing Sinatra songs about a guy alone drinking in the bar at two in the morning. The conventional wisdom is that the best humor comes from the darkest places. But you seem happy.
SM: I’ve talked to other people in the industry who have this paradox of, “No, my parents were great. They were supportive. They worked multiple jobs to put me through the college I wanted to go to.” I had a terrific childhood. My parents did put away their share of booze every night, but they were always peaceful people. That’s the only thing I can think of. Well, were they just buzzed a lot? Is that where this comes from? I don’t know. I don’t remember them being anything but model parents. It does makes me a lot slower to write jokes. I sit in the room with guys who astonish me with how fast and how well they can write jokes, and usually there’s a lot of pain in their pasts. I think that line can be pretty easily drawn.
I do have anxiety that I’m sure there are members of my family that I can trace it back to. You know, the grandparent who scares the shit out of you about eating an apple that hasn’t been washed. I think one time I was told, “I once knew a man who died from eating fruit that wasn’t washed” when I was like five years old. Things like that probably added up. And we all have that kind of stuff. But look, I have my share of anxiety that is very real. And I have plenty of times where I’ve got my Xanax in my pocket and suddenly my body just decides to go into panic mode.
Overall it’s not so much, and the dark and melancholy Sinatra tunes are my favorites not because I need somebody to express my fucking pain to the world because I’m full of self-pity. It’s that that’s where all the great orchestrations are. And oftentimes they’re out of tempo, so you have the great unpredictability of the absence of a percussion section.
ESQ: When did you meet Frank Sinatra, Jr.?
SM: We had written an episode of Family Guy about Brian and Stewie opening at a nightclub. I had seen him on The Sopranos when he was playing himself, and I thought, he’s obviously got a sense of self awareness and possibly a sense of humor about himself, and so why not try it? He came in and he was just totally game for anything. He just became a friend to the show, coming back over and over. A guy who knew his stuff.
And then he died in I think 2015. I still have a voicemail on my phone that I’ve never deleted. I don’t have the heart to. Is that macabre? I don’t sit there listening to it. But every once in a while I run across it and it’s like, This person existed. This person was here.
ESQ: I would imagine that with your success, you could pretty much get any project made.
SM: If you’re in your genre, yeah. I mean, look, if you’re Spielberg and you have defined half a century of popular culture, you get to make what you want. But there’s oftentimes a fear, particularly now as I step outside of what I do. Did Sandler have a tough time getting Punch-Drunk Love sold? I don't know. I look at something like Memoirs of an Invisible Man with Chevy Chase, which took a lot of shit because everyone was hoping that it was going to be Fletch. But I actually loved that movie. There are things that are very worthwhile when people have the guts to kind of try something.
ESQ: Robin Williams—what was that movie? Photomat?
SM: Yeah, One-Hour Photo. There was a Family Guy joke that you know it’s a serious movie because Robin Williams has a beard.
ESQ: You're talking about this musical movie you want to do set in the '40s, but are there other worlds you want to conquer that you haven't?
SM: I’ve been lucky enough to work in a lot of different media in a lot of different genres to really have a shot to—
ESQ: But it’s not luck. You’ve made it happen.
SM: Yes, I, I, I, I do work hard. [Laughs.] I do work hard. I throw my all into it. I’d probably be married with a family if I didn't. [Laughs, but a little uneasily.] It’s a tradeoff, because it’s two loves competing with each other. You love the person you’re with, but you love your job. And if they’re also in entertainment, and they’re passionate about what they’re doing, they’re a writer or a painter, they love their work, too. You’re both competing with another love, which is a pursuit rather than a person—it’s a tough one. You’re not looking at the clock every day saying, when the hell do I get to go home? You want to be there another four hours because you want to get it right because you’re passionate about the work. That’s probably why so many entertainment families are fucked up.
ESQ: I don’t know you, but I have to say again, you seem happy.
SM: Yeah. I find plenty of ways to say to myself, Shit, I should have done this differently or I should have fought harder for that. But it’s all eclipsed by the fact that I do consider myself very lucky to have made at least one thing that worked.
ESQ: That’s more than most people get. And I should point out that you’ve done more than one thing that worked.
SM [smiling]: It’s been alright. Yeah, it’s been alright.
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