The Song David Bowie Wrote To Get Revenge On Frank Sinatra

British art rocker David Bowie had a long, tragic, and famously chameleonic career, but one song in his vast oeuvre perhaps stands out as his signature: 1971's "Life On Mars?" The soaring ballad featured keyboardist Rick Wakemad and was recorded using the very same piano used for the Beatles' "Hey Jude. It's the centerpiece of Bowie's classic album "Hunky Dory," and it was released as a single in the United Kingdom, where it peaked at No. 3 on the singles chart. The song's lyrics speculate on the existence of extraterrestrial life, which chimed with the theme of his moon-landings era hit "Space Oddity" and hinted at what was to come on his next album, "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." 

But while "Life on Mars?" soon became a campy glam-rock staple and a space-age anthem, Bowie's inspirations for the song were far more classic. As the sleeve of the album "Hunky Dory" notes, the ballad was "Inspired by Frankie," a nod to Frank Sinatra, whose 1969 hit "My Way" was apparently released at the expense of another song that Bowie had been commissioned to write. Though little reflected in its lyrical themes, "Life on Mars?" was partly intended as a swipe at the veteran Rat Pack crooner, and it was Bowie's way of showcasing his growing artistic ambitions.

In 1967, Parisian singer Claude Francois had a hit in the French charts with the song "Comme D'Habitude," which translates to "As Usual." The song is a mournful requiem for a relationship that lost its excitement through the mundanity of everyday life and is seemingly coming to an end. In the 1960s, David Bowie was still a budding artist. He'd tried his hand at several projects but failed to get any mainstream traction. Nevertheless, he was linked to a publishing company, which believed that the melody to "Comme D'Habitude" could serve as the basis for a new song for listeners outside France.  With this in mind, it commissioned Bowie to write a fresh set of lyrics for the track with an eye to lining up a release for English-speaking markets.

Bowie fulfilled the task, delivering a set of lyrics he titled "Even A Fool Learns To Love," which he recorded as a demo using the original song as a backing track. However, his lyrics were not selected. Instead, fellow musician Paul Anka produced a new set of lyrics for the now timeless "My Way." (Fun fact: There was a time when singing "My Way" was a death sentence in the Philippines.)

As David Bowie recalled in an interview with British chat show host Michael Parkinson decades after he had finally found fame, no one at his publishing company informed him that his version of "Comme D'Habitude" had been rejected. Instead, he described how he was listening to the radio one day when "My Way" came over the airwaves. Once he realized what had happened, he was furious — "for about a year," he recalled. A year after "My Way," Bowie had the first significant hit of his career with 1969's "Space Oddity," but the memory of missing out on releasing his own version of "Comme D'Habitude" stayed with him.

In response to Frank Sinatra's soaring ballad, Bowie challenged himself to write a song just as overblown as a form of revenge. "Life on Mars?" was recorded in August 1971, just around the time he was finding his voice. "There are clutches of melody in that that were definite parodies," Bowie admitted in 1993, per "Strange Fascination" by David Buckley. Critics have also noticed similarities, too, in the bellowed vocals of the songs' finales and considered "Life On Mars" a kind of anti-"My Way." Nevertheless, the song instantly grew away from its source material, and it remains one of the defining songs in David Bowie's discography.

But "Life on Mars?" wasn't the only time Bowie settled a musical feud. Here's another song in which Bowie took aim at another musician, this time in a brutally honest way.