Crate Digging is our recurring feature where artists share favorite albums within a theme that all music fans should hear. In this edition, animator and singer Seth MacFarlane reveals 10 picks from Frank Sinatra and contemporary albums in the Great American Songbook.
There’s another side to Seth MacFarlane that runs deeper than his comedy empire: he’s a serious student of the Great American Songbook, with multiple throwback albums to his name and a reverence for the craft that borders on scholarly. In conversation with Consequence, MacFarlane reveals his musical North Star wasn’t contemporary pop or rock, but the lush orchestrations of classic film scores.
“I was a big fan of film scores when I was in school,” he says. “These composers were writing contemporary classical music and offering something that was so different than what we were getting in every other platform.”
That love of orchestration led him to an unexpected discovery in college: picking up a Frank Sinatra album and realizing that what he thought he knew about Ol’ Blue Eyes was “about 2% of what he really was.” The revelation transformed MacFarlane into not just a fan, but a practitioner, recording his own albums with full orchestras and the same attention to arrangement that defined the golden age of American popular music.
MacFarlane’s latest album, Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements (available now on vinyl and CD, or stream it on Apple Music or Amazon Music), continues his mission to keep those traditions alive. Released over the summer, it features lush orchestrations and finds MacFarlane interpreting classics with the same “no safety net” approach he admires in his heroes. Working with a full orchestra and capturing as much as possible live in the studio, the album showcases his growth as a vocalist while maintaining the spontaneity and warmth that defined the golden age recordings he champions. It’s both a love letter to the past and proof that this style of music-making still has a vital place in the present.
For MacFarlane, that spontaneity and authenticity is the magic he chases in his own recordings. His ten album picks aren’t just a playlist; they’re a masterclass in what happens when vocalists, arrangers, and orchestras come together at the peak of their powers, creating something that can never quite be replicated in our Pro Tools era.
From Sinatra’s moody collaborations with Nelson Riddle to the pure joy of duet albums, these are the records that shaped MacFarlane’s understanding of what American popular music could be — and still inspire him to keep that tradition alive.
Watch the full interview above (or via YouTube), and read MacFarlane’s Crate Digging below. You can also add all of MacFarlane’s picks — and his own Lush Life — to your collection by picking them up here.
Earlier this year, MacFarlane joined the Kyle Meredith With… podcast to discuss Lush Life.
