Duets Songwriting Credits by Frank Sinatra

Duets is the fifty-eighth studio album by Frank Sinatra, released in November 1993 on Capitol Records and produced by Phil Ramone. It was Sinatra's most commercially successful album of the final decade of his career, a collection of 12 collaborative performances with major artists of multiple generations including Tony Bennett, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, U2's Bono, Natalie Cole, Liza Minnelli, and Julio Iglesias. Sinatra did not write any of the material; the album revisits songs from throughout his career ('The Lady Is a Tramp' with Bennett, 'New York, New York' with Cole, 'I've Got You Under My Skin' with Bono, and 'All the Way' with Celine Dion) in what was conceived as a farewell celebration of the catalog. The duets were technically assembled rather than recorded together, with most collaborators overdubbing their parts onto Sinatra's pre-recorded vocals in their own studios, a production approach that Sinatra had not participated in directly; the artifice was widely noted but did not affect the commercial reception. Duets reached number two on the Billboard 200 with 282,000 first-week sales, the fastest-selling album of Sinatra's career, and has been certified seven-times platinum in the United States, generating a sequel (Duets II) in 1994. The album is primarily significant as a commercial and cultural event: a mainstream summation of Sinatra's legacy packaged for an audience that had grown up after his Capitol peak, and the final major chapter of his commercial career before his death in 1998.