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.’

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.”

By MIKE ROSS, SPECIAL TO SUN MEDIA

Michael Buble never said he was the “new Sinatra.”

No one from his record company ever said it. His producer David Foster might have said it, but he was too smart to say it to the press.

No, the Buble-as-new-Sinatra phenomenon is completely a media creation - one that was followed closely by angry pronouncements within the media that “Michael Buble ain’t no Sinatra.”

Some critics even say this fresh-faced kid from Vancouver isn’t fit to shine the Chairman’s shoes, were he still alive and needing shoes to shine.

Let’s look at this closely.

On stage for a soldout show at Rexall Place last night, Buble doesn’t have any mob connections that we know of, never threatened to give anyone a knuckle sandwich and was never quoted referring to a woman as a “skirt.”

Both Frank and Michael plundered the ever-expanding great American songbook, brought lounge music to a wider audience and both are/were greatly appealing to women, and it remains to be seen if Buble is going to coast on his legend for the last 20 years of his career like Sinatra did, but Buble also writes some of his own material.

Now I’m not here to diss Frank and risk chin music from the heavens, but let’s just put this in perspective. This style of music is not going to go away.

There will always be a new version of Fever, a revised take on Come Fly With Me, a fresh approach to Summertime.

Every generation has a designated crooner and Michael Buble just happens to be this generation’s. I’m sorry. But that’s just the way it is. If you’re going to complain, complain about the generation.

Moving on, there is no denying Buble’s God-given gift in the vocal department. His voice is aural silk. His smoky glances are capable of unhooking a woman’s bra from 100 metres. He is so cute you just want to pinch his cheeks.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The man has it all.

Backed by a small, very tight orchestra, the show was an effortless demonstration of vocal perfection balanced with Buble’s rakish sense of humour.

Being of quick wit and ironic mind, the singer treads a fine line between having fun with the lounge jazz idiom and making fun of it, as if three minutes is the longest he can stand being sincere.

Some of the songs were practically cliches themselves - Fever, Call Me Irresponsible, Always on My Mind, Me and Mrs. Jones, the latter stealing thunder from area crooner Alfie Zappacosta, who did his jazz version of the tune years ago.

Doing songs like this in a suit like that, maudlin is never far away.

Buble did his best to keep the mawk at bay with frequent pranks and pratfalls.

For example, following his performance of the big, gooey hit Home - one for the ladies, by the response - Buble sent one out to the men.

Cue campy Elvis impersonation on That’s Alright, Mama and a spirited rendition of Y.M.C.A. by the Village People.

The guys in the horn section doing the moves was a nice touch.

Then it was back to wowing the audience with another heartbreaking ballad or swinging romp.

Buble worked the crowd like a master.

No, I have no problem with Michael Buble being called the new Sinatra. If he keeps this up, we’ll be talking about the new Michael Buble in 40 years or so.

It takes a real mensch to bring an opening act who might upstage you - so Buble brought seven singers who can each sing circles around him, an a capella group from Brooklyn, N.Y., called Naturally 7.

This was a weird one.

Slightly precious, but unbelievably skilled, the singers called what they do “vocal play,” which doesn’t begin to describe the remarkable array of sounds they generated - including uncanny reproductions of drums, bass, electric guitar, Hammond organ, DJ, you name it.

Taking time to prove it was all human voices with detailed demonstrations kind of brought the show to a grinding halt, but it’s preferable to having people think there was a real band behind the curtain, or worse, that they were lip-syncing.

Material was a surprise, too, tending towards artfully mangled Simon and Garfunkel and Mr. Mister, believe it or not, along with a gospel number on which the Almighty sounds a bit needy: “Say that you love me, that there’s no one above me.”

The climax of the set was a mind-blowing version of In the Air Tonight. Seven black guys in white suits making Phil Collins sound sublime - there’s something you don’t hear every day.

Source: Edmonton Sun

This is a video with Naturally 7 Live in Paris Subway: