Everyone knows Sinatra's My Way. Critics say Nina Simone's is better.

This song wasn't born in triumph.

In 1967 French songwriter Jacques Revaux wrote the melody while behind on commissions. The French lyrics told a sadder story, a marriage dying from routine and boredom. Nothing about pride, nothing about a life well lived.

Paul Anka, a Canadian, heard it on French radio and rewrote it in English for one person. Frank Sinatra had told him he was thinking about quitting the business. Anka called him in Nevada and said he had something just for him.

Sinatra released it in 1969 and it became the song people think of first when they think of him, an old man looking back with total certainty he did it his way.

It became one of the most covered songs ever recorded, and every version pulled it somewhere new. Sid Vicious turned it into a sneer years later. Nina Simone recorded hers in 1971 and rebuilt it from the ground up, congas underneath, a Latin groove, nothing resigned about it.

Here's what I didn't know until I looked closer. By the time she cut this, Simone was nowhere near certain about anything. She'd just spent a decade inside the Civil Rights movement and watched it die, its people gone, jailed, or quiet and respectable. She said she felt like her people had rolled over and played dead, and regretted the years she'd given it.

In 1970 she tore into political leaders onstage in Newark, and later called that night the start of walking away from political performance for good. That same year she left the country, divorced her husband and manager, and stopped paying US taxes in protest of Vietnam.

The song people call an anthem of no regrets was recorded by someone who'd just said, out loud, she regretted the last ten years.

She still sounds unbeatable on it. Critics put it plainly: Sinatra sounds like a man waiting for the curtain, she sounds like she means every word.

Tell me who actually owns this song.