He’s best known as the creator of “Family Guy” (as well as “American Dad!” and the movie “Ted,”) but Seth MacFarlane is also an accomplished song-and-dance man who’s earned five Grammy nominations and an Oscar nod (in the category of best original song for "Everybody Needs a Best Friend" from “Ted.”)
On New Year’s Eve, you can see for yourself how talented the 51-year-old Rhode Island School of Design grad is when he performs with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall. (The Pops’ guest conductor that night will be composer and frequent MacFarlane collaborator Joel McNeely.)
MacFarlane, a baritone, is slated to perform a selection of big band standards and favorites from the Great American Songbook, which he’s very familiar with. Over the summer, MacFarlane released “Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements” — his ninth studio album — a collection that includes a dozen arrangements originally created for Ol’ Blue Eyes by collaborators Nelson Riddle, Billy May, and Don Costa.
On a recent episode of the Canadian podcast “Q," MacFarlane said he was a student at RISD when he bought a Sinatra album containing some of his lesser-known songs and he was instantly smitten.
As retro as that might sound, MacFarlane was actually ahead of his time when it comes to the Federal Communications Commission, the federal agency whose Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, had a hand in getting late-night host Jimmy Kimmel temporarily suspended. Twenty years ago, on the fourth season of “Family Guy,” MacFarlane wrote “The FCC Song,” an amusing ditty lamenting the agency’s humorless overseers: “They’re as stuffy as the stuffiest of special interest groups/ Make a joke about your bowels and they order in the troops/ Any baby with a brain could tell them everybody poops.” (BTW, the song was OK’d by the FCC.)
MacFarlane’s New Year’s Eve show will mark the third time he has performed with the Pops. He previously joined the orchestra for shows at Tanglewood and Symphony Hall in 2016 and 2018.
Tickets go on sale Thursday at 10 a.m.; bso.org.
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com.