It didn't feel organic and [Tito] Gobbi was one of the artists that was able to, along with Maria Callas, incorporate not just the sound, but the emotion, the technique of the singing.
Oddly enough, my mother was born in Southampton. I have roots in Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor. My grandfather, her father, Stefano Rullo, when he came from Naples, he went to Pennsylvania and worked coal mines.
Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now.
I would want to bring a certain kind of unity and awareness to different things. Even in the 80s, I wanted to do something with Unicef, and I wrote a song for Unicef, but I didn't have any means or the celebrity.
Everyone, young and old, was responding to [Frank] Sinatra. So, the first time that I physically remember, it was as a youth. He always seemed to be there, let me put it that way. I can't remember the exact first time, but I can remember the effect his voice had on me.
I trained with a guy named Tito Gobbi, who was the Marlon Brando of the opera world. Tito Gobbi was the greatest singing baritone in the opera world and I studied in Florence, Firenze, with him. That was my first love, as it was Frank Sinatra's, oddly enough.