Buble changes his tune on ‘Crazy’
Posted by krees in Articles, tags: Michael Bublè, Naturally 7
By DARRYL STERDAN — Sun Media
The heart wants what it wants. And Michael Buble’s heart just wasn’t in it anymore.
Despite the massive success of his first three albums, the Vancouver crooner had fallen out of love — not with the music he was making, but with the way he was making it.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says from the Left Coast. “I’m really proud of my first three records. But they were done in a very slick way. They sound really good; sonically, they’re beautiful. They’re all about perfection — everything is recorded onto ProTools, and if something isn’t perfect, you pull it out and fix it. There are no mistakes.
“And as much as I liked them,” he confesses, “there was something missing for me.”
So, before he set out to make album No. 4 — the romantically themed Crazy Love, which comes out later this week — Buble did some soul-searching. And like a lot of guys looking for a new spark, he started off by trying to rekindle a few old flames.
“I would listen to my records and study them,” he says. “And then I would put on a Beatles record or a Frank (Sinatra) record, an old Elvis record or a Motown record. And I would feel something — I can’t really explain it, but there was a great presence in some of those records. I kept wondering why they had this great presence and why I didn’t always feel that when I was listening to myself, or to other records that are made today. And one of the first things I realized was that we live in a ProTools, American Idol generation. We’ve become used to listening to this absolutely perfect music, but the heart and the soul are gone. It’s so antiseptic.”
At the same time, he admits, he was getting slightly tired of hearing an eternal refrain from fans and critics: That his live shows — which feature his easygoing humour and personality almost as prominently as his music — are more enjoyable than his studio albums. Putting the two ideas together led to his eureka moment. “I realized that maybe I could meet somewhere in the middle and capture the energy and the raw excitement that comes from doing it in a live setting.”
His idea: To record Crazy Love the way his favourite old records were cut — live off the floor, with all the musicians playing at once, aiming for a great groove instead of a perfect take. But he knew changing his tune at this stage of his career would be easier said than done. After selling 21 million copies of his first three albums, he wasn’t sure his Grammy-winning producer David Foster — who met Buble in 2000 when the latter sang at the wedding of Brian Mulroney’s daughter, Caroline — would be willing to redefine their relationship.
But Buble went in anyway to have The Talk: You know, the one that starts with, ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’
“I said, ‘I need to do this in a different way. It has to be far more organic. I don’t want to record to a click track. I don’t want to tape everything separately. I want to shove those microphones in the room and I want the band just to go in there and play. I don’t care if the tempo speeds up or slows down. I just want it to feel great. I want those drums to be bleeding into the bass, and the bass bleeding into the strings, and them bleeding into my vocals. I want this to have some real edge.’ ”
Foster’s response? “He said, ‘That’s not what I do.’ But eventually he said, ‘OK, we’ll give it a shot.’ ”
So Buble went into Vancouver’s Warehouse studio with his band and longtime engineer Humberto Gatica, whose credits include sessions with Sinatra and samba master Antonio Carlos Jobim.
“I got my 18-piece big band, threw them in a room, chucked up the microphones, set up a little vocal booth, and we did Stardust with (a cappella septet) Naturally 7. My rhythm section was 10 feet away, and nobody wore (headphone) cans, and we played. We played the song three times and we ended up using the first take. It was so satisfying.”
Sadly, it wasn’t love at first sight for everyone.
“I remember taking Stardust to Foster and I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Dude, it’s pitchy.’ And it makes you second-guess yourself. But I kept listening to the record and saying to myself, ‘I’m not crazy. If this feels so good to me, if it feels this soulful, other people have got to feel what I’m feeling. I’m not alone.’ ”
Buble stuck to his guns and eventually won out. The result is the 13-track Crazy Love, which includes a mixed bag of tunes about romance — everything from a bombastically punchy version of Cry Me a River to a hard-swinging take on Eagles’ Heartache Tonight and a gritty revamp of the Dinah Washington/Brooke Benton classic Baby (You’ve Got What it Takes) with Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings (who double as Amy Winehouse’s backing band).
“There are songs that are happy and songs that are sad and songs that are longing,” says the 34-year-old bachelor, who has been romantically linked to singer-actress Emily Blunt and, more recently, Argentine actress Luisana Lopilato. “But I chose the songs because I knew I could bring a lot to them. I knew I could dig deep. Basically, I was going into the corner and putting my head down and trying to be authentic.”
Between that authenticity and the immediacy of the recordings, Crazy Love is his favourite album, he says. And he’s so head over heels about the way it was made, he’s willing to make a long-term commitment — for richer or poorer.
“You know, I’ve had commercial success. I’ve sold 21 million records. Now I feel I have a responsibility to myself to take a risk and not worry as much about this being commercially successful. I want to have a lot more artistic integrity. I said to everyone, ‘If this doesn’t sell as many copies, I’m sorry.’ And that was a hard thing, obviously, because you want both. But I erred on the side of integrity. I tried to make a record that really moved me. And I hoped that if it moved me it would move other people.
“It isn’t perfect,” he admits. “But it feels better than anything I’ve ever done before. And now that it’s done, I don’t think I’ll ever make a record again the old way.”
Michael Buble may be crazy, but he’s not an idiot.
While his fourth studio CD, Crazy Love, is a deliberate attempt to move forward, he doesn’t want to leave any of his old fans behind.
“I need to show growth without alienating 21 million people who were kind enough to support me and buy the records and go to the shows. I think that would be a very stupid thing,” he admits. “When I was 16 years old, I started singing and working in the clubs. And I sang standards and loved it. After all that work, and getting signed 10 years later, and working harder and harder and harder for the success, I wouldn’t want to just turn around and say, ‘Now I’m going to make a pop record.’ ”
So even though he continues to expand his repertoire, don’t expect him to quit singing standards.
“I love the American songbook, and I love interpreting those songs. I would really miss interpreting some great songs. I’m proud to do what I do. I’m proud to be one of the lucky ones who gets to continue the legacy of my idols.
“But one of the reasons I feel lucky to be in the position I’m in is that I get to be a little bit schizophrenic. I get to do everything from R&B to pop to rock to big band to the American standards stuff. And I get to put it all onto one record and hope that thematically it works.”
Not everything works for everybody, he admits — neither his manager, Bruce Allen, nor producer Bob Rock like his cover of Eagles’ Heartache Tonight.
“My manager just keeps saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ And Bob said the same thing: ‘That’s the Eagles, man. I just can’t get my head around it.’ But a lot of my friends that are a lot younger, it’s their favourite song on the record.”
There are also plenty of songs Buble can’t get his head around.
“There’s thousands of songs that are brought to me, and I go, ‘No! No! Never.’ Like Sinatra’s My Way — I can’t tell you how many people have come to me with that. I’ll never touch that. I’m 34 years old; I’m not ready to sing that song. And even when I am ready, I don’t know that I’ll touch it.”
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