Fly Me to the Moon

#45 / March 4 Podcast

Mar 04, 2022

Seventy years ago, songwriter Bart Howard wanted to write a sassy little tune about how people seldom say what they mean, and that’s why he called it “In Other Words.” But then Bart learned his own lesson about other words.

When Kaye Ballard brought the song to the radio in 1954, fans didn’t call in by its name. Instead, when they phoned their favorite disc jockey to ask to hear this cool new melody, they used the song’s evocative, highly poetic opening line. When that same thing kept happening all across the country, the record company rushed out a re-release of the song under the title that the public had chosen for it.

The story goes that “Fly Me to the Moon” was written in response to Howard’s publisher’s appeal for simpler, less grandiloquent verbiage. “It took me 20 years to find out how to write a song in 20 minutes,” Howard said. “The song just fell out of me. One publisher wanted me to change the lyric to ‘take me to the moon.’ Had I done that I don’t know where I’d be today.”

Of course, the song often is associated with Frank Sinatra, though his version wasn’t recorded until 10 years after Howard wrote it. However, it was Sinatra’s 1961 recording that traveled with Apollo 11 for the 1969 Moon landing. Thirty years later, the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame recognized it as a “Towering Song,” one “that has influenced our culture in a unique way.”

Over the years, the song has been recorded by everyone from Nat King Cole, Count Basie and Earl Grant to Connie Francis and Doris Day. More recently it has had a rebirth in the movies, used in the opening titles of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, “Wall Street” and in the closing moments of Clint Eastwood’s 2000 “Space Cowboys.”

Our Take on the Tune

We’ve been doing this song for a dozen years of so, but it’s always new, depending on who’s on hand to handle the solos. Last night it was Veezy and Danny’s turn to find sweet new nuance in all those old familiar chords. Click here to hear The Flood’s “Fly” 2022.