Can any song be made to swing?
Paul Anka: If a song has some sense of structure, some chords to work with, absolutely. Rock doesn’t swing naturally — it uses another kind of rhythm. But you can take a song and swing it. This disc was an easy evolution; it gets down to personalization – doing it, singing the lyric, etc. Do you love to work out that puzzle of taking something apart and putting it back together again? Oh yeah. There’s a craftsmanship [to] trying to articulate something new. That’s the fun part: resurrecting something from another state. Were there songs you tried that simply wouldn’t yield to an arrangement? A few. Good songs, too. Things that almost made it: U2’s “One,” Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis.” That’s a great song I just couldn’t get the vibe with. Frustrating? Yeah, but there was a standard set: Everything had to be of a certain quality. These aren’t novelty records. It’s a disc of good songs. So you really get the integrity up front. “Memphis” started nice, but after a bit we were stuck wi
