In 1956, when Paul Anka was 15 years old, he idolized Chuck Berry. So, when the star came to play his home town of Ottawa, Canada, the ambitious kid made sure to sneak backstage with his guitar to play him a song he’d just written. “I started singing Diana to Chuck Berry when, suddenly, he stops me and says, ‘That’s the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life, go back to school.’”
Rather than slink away from such a pronouncement, however, Anka used it as a spur. “Revenge is a motivator like you won’t believe,” the 84-year-old star said with an eruptive laugh the other day. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to show him.’ That attitude has prevailed for me through my entire life.”
It didn’t hurt that, within a year, his dewy Diana became a global colossus, rising to No 1 in the UK and the US, making him the first Canadian artist to top the American charts while insuring he wouldn’t spend one more day at school. The next year, his equally lush single You Are My Destiny broke the top 10 in both countries, a triumph he tripled in 1959 and ’60 with mooning touchstones like Lonely Boy, Put Your Head on my Shoulder and Puppy Love.
Remarkable as those achievements may have been, what separated Anka’s work from that of other teen idols – then and now – was that he wrote all those songs himself and retained the publishing rights. Small wonder during our 90-minute interview, Anka referred to himself as a writer no fewer than 22 times. “Without the writer of the song, there’s no record companies, no executives, no lawyers. There’s nothing,” he said.
At the same time, Anka knew his career would be nothing if he didn’t find a way to mature his sound as his teen years waned. Over the decades, he did both with enough regularity and rapidity to sustain a seven-decade career, extended by a new album, Paul Anka: My Way, set to arrive before his 85th birthday next year. In the process he forged key connections to stars from the 1950s (Buddy Holly) through today (Drake). Along the way, his compositions have ranked among the most performed pieces in music history, most notably My Way, which managed to become a defining anthem for both Frank Sinatra and Sid Vicious, as well as the bouncy theme music for Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, a 15-second refrain that ran the full 30-year span of the show, netting Anka multimillions in the process.
The full arc of that evolution is now being told in a new HBO documentary titled Paul Anka: His Way. Speaking by phone from an LA recording studio near his home, Anka said his primary reason to participate in the film was to school the benighted in the scope of his achievements. “There are a lot of people out there who don’t know I wrote the last three Michael Jackson hits,” he said. “I take great pride in that.”
The film’s structure – half of which takes place in the present – stresses another angle that’s crucial to him. “I want people to understand that I’m still functioning, that I can walk,” he said with a laugh. “Last week I played to 10,000 people at a stadium in Mexico!”
The audiences he’s finding in such places aren’t entirely old. Six decades after its presumed sell-by date, Put Your Head on My Shoulder became a TikTok phenomenon by generating more than 145m collective views from over 21,000 videos made by young people miming to the song. In 2021, a version that mashes his original song with Doja Cat’s single “Streets” became a top 10 hit. “What a life was put on me that I can just sit home and get a check for something I did years ago,” he said. “It’s stupid money.”
If the result has bought him a far more opulent lifestyle than he started with, his family were hardly starving when he was growing up. His parents, of Lebanese descent, ran a successful restaurant in Ottawa and, when prominent stars would stop by, Anka would make them listen to him sing. “I was always a ballsy kid,” he said.
While his father wanted him to go into the family business he said, “I believed in being creative,” and he wasn’t shy about it. At 14, while visiting an uncle in California he sought out a local label that scored a hit with Stranded in the Jungle by the Cadets. He convinced them to let him cut a song he wrote, using the Cadets as his backup. While the song bombed, the next year he lobbied his parents to send him to New York where he successfully got the producer Don Costa to sign him to his new label, ABC-Paramount. Today, he refers to his first single for them, Diana, as “a stupid little song about a girl who wouldn’t even look at me”. Regardless, fans swooned.
Before that, Anka says, he had “absolutely no success” with girls. “I went from knowing nothing to winding up with French women, Italian women, Japanese women who were all teaching me everything I was dying to know.”
At the same time, he felt a cog in the teen machine. “Older people were telling me what to do and what to wear,” he said. “I was in a cage.”
Worse, he was bullied by some older stars on tour, especially Jerry Lee Lewis. “He hated that I was so successful,” he said. “He picked on me and I would fight back. We would be throwing things at each other.”
By contrast, he formed so tight a bond with Buddy Holly, that even though Holly was another rare teen idol who wrote his own songs, he still asked Anka to pen one for him. The result, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, later covered by stars from Linda Ronstadt to Eva Cassidy, was the last piece Holly recorded before his death in a plane crash in 1959. He recorded it in a very different style than his other hits, eschewing the Crickets’ rhythm section to cut it with strings. Immediately after his demise, it became the first posthumously released song to top the UK charts. Still, Anka was so crushed by Holly’s death, he gave all of his publishing royalties for the song to his widow, a fact which, oddly, isn’t in the documentary.
Despite his success as a teen dream, Anka was already feeling itchy. “I had this squeaky little voice, and I really wanted to mature,” he said.
His role models were the kings of Vegas – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr – all guys in suits who swaggered with a louche sophistication. Rather than snubbing the kid, “they totally embraced me,” Anka said, making him the youngest person to play Vegas to that point. In return, he brought a new audience to town, delighting the mafia guys who ran the place. Today, he has nothing but glowing things to say about the Mob. “I knew what they were capable of doing but I can honestly say they were gentlemen with me,” he said. “You’d shake their hands, and you had a deal they stood by.”
In 1962, he made another important connection with an older entertainer. While brainstorming a TV special for Granada he felt it needed a comedian to break up the music. He settled on Johnny Carson, who wasn’t widely known at the time. When the comic got the chance to take over the Tonight Show shortly after, he asked Anka to write him a theme song and, while Carson loved the result, he ultimately told Anka he had to go with a piece penned by the show’s musical director, Skitch Henderson. That’s when Anka business savvy kicked in: he offered Carson half his publishing for the song if he would use his piece instead. The bribe worked! Years later, Carson’s lawyer told the New York Times that the royalties for it generated between $800,000 and $900,000 a year for three decades.
That was hardly Anka’s only shrewd business move. In 1963, when his record company started losing faith in him, he bought back his entire catalogue, presaging Taylor Swift’s move decades later. Then, to exploit his growing international audience, he started recording his songs in a variety of languages, including Italian, which ended up making him one of the biggest-selling stars in that country. Still, by the British Invasion of the mid-60s Anka fell far behind the trends. In reaction, he began to act, if not particularly well, though he did land a role in the respected film The Longest Day, for which he also wrote the musical theme.
His true comeback didn’t begin until 1969 when he wrote My Way as a final song for Sinatra who told him he was planning to retire at 58. Anka matched his self-valorizing lyric to a melody from a French song whose rights he acquired two years earlier. Today, he says he has no idea how, at 24, he had the wisdom to write one of the most celebrated anthems of ageing ever. “Where the Jesus did this come from?” he remembered thinking. “It changed my life.
Floored as he was by Sinatra’s version, he was initially appalled by Sid Vicious’s anarchic take, which added to the lyric words like “fuck”, “cunt” and “queer”. “Would I have recorded it that way? No!” Anka said. “Would I have the imagination to do that? No! But I think everybody is entitled to express themselves.”
A song he wrote for Tom Jones in 1971, She’s a Lady, not only gave the Welsh singer one of his biggest hits, it became a touchstone of swank. Three years later, Anka revived his own performing career with You’re Having My Baby, and while the song became his first No 1 hit in 15 years, it made critics blanch. The lyrics – which described the woman as having his baby – inspired Ms. Magazine to name him “Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year”. “How could it be negative towards women?” Anka asked. “I have five women living in the house.” (He has five daughters.) “It was PMS all over the goddamn place.”
Though his own hits dried up after the 80s, he kept reinventing himself, most obviously on his Rock Swings album in 2005 on which he performed swinging versions of guitar-driven songs like Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. “Dave Grohl told me he didn’t know what the lyrics [to Teen Spirit] meant until my version,” Anka said.
The Michael Jackson hits he co-wrote, all released posthumously, came from sessions Anka did with the late star in the 80s. After Jackson’s death, his estate used key parts of one song to fashion the single This Is It, without knowing its true provenance. When Anka got wind of it, he threatened to sue if they didn’t give him 50% of the publishing, which they promptly did. The same pattern repeated for two more Jackson singles, one of which was sampled for Drake’s Don’t Matter to Me.
In the years since, Anka has continued to tour. He still performs Puppy Love at 84. “Am I embarrassed to sing it now?” He admits: “Kinda.”
To get over that, he puts himself in the place of fans who still clamor for it. He plans to continue singing it on his tour next year. He also has a new album he’s working on that’s meant to follow the one coming in February. Oh, and then there’s a play about his life he’s overseeing which he hopes to bring to Broadway. Asked what his own final curtain will be, Anka surmises the play might be a fitting culmination, though he isn’t sure. “I plan to keep doing this until I can’t stand,” he said. “Then it will be the big wave and out.”
