The 1970s File Feature
Let Me Try Again (Laisse Moi Le Temps)
Frank Sinatra and "Let Me Try Again (Laisse Moi Le Temps)" Frank Sinatra had one of the most complex and fascinating career trajectories in the history of Am…
01 The Story
Frank Sinatra and "Let Me Try Again (Laisse Moi Le Temps)"
Frank Sinatra had one of the most complex and fascinating career trajectories in the history of American popular music. By the early 1970s, the singer who had defined the Capitol Records era of swinging orchestral pop in the 1950s and the Reprise Records decade of the 1960s was navigating a pop landscape that had been fundamentally transformed by rock and roll, soul, and the singer-songwriter movement. In 1971, Sinatra had publicly announced his retirement, citing exhaustion and a sense that the cultural moment had moved beyond his natural territory. That retirement lasted less than two years, a fact that spoke to his undiminished ambition and his continued conviction that he had meaningful artistic contributions to make.
When Sinatra returned to recording in 1973, he did so with considerable commercial ambition. His comeback album, Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back, released on Reprise Records, was produced by Gordon Jenkins and Don Costa and was deliberately designed to reestablish his presence across both traditional and contemporary radio formats. The album featured a mix of new pop material and the kind of carefully arranged ballads that had always been Sinatra's strongest commercial and artistic territory. "Let Me Try Again" was among the fresh pop selections on the record, and it was chosen as one of the album's single releases because its melodic accessibility and emotional directness gave it genuine radio potential across multiple demographic groups.
"Let Me Try Again" was the English-language adaptation of a French song, "Laisse Moi Le Temps," with the original French subtitle retained in the American release. The French original was composed by Michel Jourdan and Caravelli (Jacques Plante was also credited as a lyricist in various markets), and the English lyrics were adapted by Paul Anka, who was himself a significant figure in the Sinatra orbit during the early 1970s. Anka had written "My Way" for Sinatra in 1969, and his involvement in this adaptation signaled a continuing creative partnership that had proven commercially valuable for both parties and that had produced some of the most memorable recordings of Sinatra's late career.
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 10, 1973, entering at number 90. It climbed steadily over the following weeks, reaching its peak position of number 63 during the chart week of December 29, 1973, and spending ten weeks total on the chart. While that peak placed the record solidly in the mid-chart range rather than among the week's biggest hits, it was significant as evidence that Sinatra retained real commercial viability on the pop chart well into his late career. The song also performed strongly on the Adult Contemporary chart, where his core audience was concentrated and where the record's orchestral sophistication was most warmly received.
Reprise Records coordinated a significant promotional campaign around the Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back comeback, including a television special that aired on NBC in November 1973 and drew enormous ratings. That special, featuring Sinatra's first major television performance in two years, provided a powerful platform for the album's material and significantly boosted the commercial performance of "Let Me Try Again" by exposing it to a mass television audience at the precise moment when the single was in its chart ascent. The synergy between the television special and the single release represented a sophisticated understanding of how to manage an artist's return to public prominence after an extended absence.
Sinatra's interpretation of the song benefited from the arranging capabilities of Gordon Jenkins, one of the most accomplished orchestral arrangers in the history of American popular song. Jenkins's work on the recording created a lush, sweeping backdrop that supported Sinatra's voice while never overwhelming it, a balance that required considerable craft to achieve with the elaborate string and brass writing that Jenkins brought to the session. The result was a recording that demonstrated Sinatra's enduring interpretive gifts in a contemporary production context, making "Let Me Try Again" one of the more artistically satisfying entries in the Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back project and a worthy successor to the great romantic ballads of his earlier career.
02 Song Meaning
The Art of the Comeback Plea in "Let Me Try Again"
"Let Me Try Again (Laisse Moi Le Temps)" is a song whose lyrical argument and Frank Sinatra's biographical situation in 1973 were almost perfectly aligned. The song is a romantic plea for a second chance, a request from a narrator who acknowledges past failures and asks to be allowed to demonstrate changed behavior. Coming from a singer who had publicly retired and then returned to the stage and studio after less than two years away, that thematic content carried an autobiographical resonance that Sinatra almost certainly recognized and embraced when selecting the material for his comeback recording sessions.
The tradition of the "second chance" song runs deep in popular music, but Frank Sinatra was a particularly apt vehicle for this specific variant. His interpretive gifts had always been most acute in material that dealt with emotional complexity, vulnerability, and the experience of time passing. The narrator of "Let Me Try Again" is not a young man in the first flush of romance but someone who carries the weight of experience and understands what has been lost through whatever failures or lapses led to the need for the plea. That kind of emotional maturity was Sinatra's native territory as an interpreter, the register in which his voice and his life experience most completely converged.
The French origin of the song adds a dimension of cultural significance. Paul Anka's English adaptation retained the French subtitle, signaling to listeners that this was a song with roots in the European chanson tradition, a tradition that had always valued emotional directness and melodic sophistication over the kind of rhythmic energy that dominated American pop radio in 1973. That positioning was commercially strategic as well as artistically coherent; it marked the song as adult material for adult sensibilities, distancing it from the youth-oriented rock and soul that dominated the singles chart while claiming a space within the sophisticated pop that Sinatra had always occupied most comfortably.
The production choices on the recording reinforce the song's thematic seriousness. The orchestral arrangement, handled in the sweeping style associated with Gordon Jenkins and Don Costa's work with Sinatra, creates a sonic environment of weight and consequence. This is not a light request for reconciliation but something that carries the gravitas of real emotional stakes. The full strings, careful dynamic control, and Sinatra's unhurried phrasing all communicate that the narrator's request is genuine and considered rather than casual or impulsive, rooted in genuine reflection rather than momentary sentiment.
The song also invites reflection on the theme of artistic reinvention, which Sinatra was himself actively engaged in during his 1973 comeback. A performer returning from retirement and asking audiences to give him another opportunity was essentially enacting the same plea the song describes. This convergence of biographical and lyrical content gave the performance an additional layer of meaning that attentive listeners could appreciate, making "Let Me Try Again" feel less like a conventional pop single and more like a personal statement from an artist who had genuinely reflected on his relationship with his public and his craft. The song thus operated simultaneously as entertainment and as a kind of public autobiography, a quality that only an artist of Sinatra's stature and self-awareness could have fully realized.
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