The next morning, as he did every day, Spence met up with his writing partners, a married pair of lyricists named Marilyn and Alan Bergman. The trio were working in a converted garage, overlooking the San Fernando Valley, with black interior walls, a poster of Picasso’s Guernica and an upright piano. Writing a song for Sinatra was, Marilyn says, “like writing for a character. He had such a well-defined persona: sexy, smooth, a little rough and complicated, exuding a dangerous heat.” By then there were a lot of Sinatra songs emphasizing the sexy and the smooth. Together, the three made a decision. They would conceive a Sinatra song that was somehow different from other Sinatra songs, one that explored the complications of adult love.
The new title song the three wrote in the garage for Sinatra was “Nice ’n’ Easy.” It contained lines like “Hey, baby, what’s your hurry/Relax and don’t you worry/We’re gonna fall in love,” along with a friskily modulated melody that always seems on the verge of charging forward before making another seductive stop along the way. In 1960, “Nice ’n’ Easy” became a No. 1 album for Capitol, with Sinatra wearing a Perry Como-like cardigan on the cover. “The sound of that record was really in the air then,” says Jonathan Schwartz, the WNYC radio host and Sinatra expert. “It was a part of America.”
“Nice ’n’ Easy” is now itself a standard, recorded by the soul singer Lou Rawls, jazz artists like Natalie Cole and John Pizzarelli and, in Spence’s own favorite, a funky country-lounge rendition by Charlie Rich. One reason it has achieved such a diverse catalog is that most love songs are about torrid romantics, and this is the rare one celebrating patient romance. It is, says Marilyn, “about let’s not rush, let’s go through the progression of a love affair. Let’s not risk breaking something that can be very fragile, a potentially serious relationship. But I think the song also has a whole sexual subtext. I think it also has to do with the act of making love.” Who better than Frank Sinatra, she thought, to tell a man how to really please a woman.
(Lew Spence (87) songwriter who composed the Grammy-nominated Frank Sinatra song “Nice 'n' Easy" and “That Face," a standard recorded by Fred Astaire. Other artists who sang Spence's songs included Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Bobby Short, Peggy Lee, Nat ("King") Cole, Johnny Mathis, Bing Crosby, Billy Eckstine, and Dinah Shore. Spence died in his sleep in Los Angeles, California on January 9, 2008.)
