He wants everybody to feel good, so why do I feel so bad?
I had half an hour with Michael Bublé. By modern standards, for a celebrity of his stature, this is an eternity. Ten to 15 minutes is about standard but that number is trending rapidly downward. A publicist recently told me four minutes is now not unheard of.
Given this relatively generous time allocation, I chose to open with a soft-ball question that I thought would help warm him up and lead to a greater quantity of quality content. The question was: “How do you become charming and how do you have charisma and how do you keep that going all the time?”
“Well,” he said, warily, “Those are loaded questions, Greg.”
I was taken aback. Loaded? Not only were they not loaded, but they had been selected specifically for their absence of loading. Furthermore, there was the way he said “Greg”. As anyone who’s watched Succession knows, that word is no longer exclusively a noun but also an adjective, used to describe someone who’s bumbling, morally defunct and an all-round loser. I can’t say for sure that Bublé was using it adjectivally, but as his answer progressed I did feel like he was presenting less like someone who was trying to charm me and more like someone who wanted to fight me.
I had expected the self-deprecating jokes, bon mots and perfectly constructed anecdotes for which he is famous, but instead he started talking about how hard he is. “I’m tough as nails,” he said. He used the phrase “I don’t give a s***”. He dropped multiple F-bombs.
Had he been aggravated by my characterisation of him as charming and charismatic? It certainly felt that way. He described himself as sophisticated, complicated, moody and strong. “Listen, man,” he said, “It’s human nature for all of us to feel the need to categorise people. That is what we need. It makes us feel safe. And it’s our job to fight that categorisation.”
I began to regret not opening the interview with the story of how I’d chosen his hit song Haven’t Met You Yet for the “Romance” playlist I’d made when I was first dating my wife (leaving off the part of the story in which she looked at me askance and witheringly said: “Michael Bublé?”)
He said: “Now, I don’t give a s*** if I’m standing in front of 80,000 people in a stadium or I’m having dinner with you, Greg, and your wife or your husband or whatever your orientation is. If I felt that someone at our dinner table was dealing with social anxiety and felt uncomfortable, it would be my literal sole mission to make sure that that person felt comfortable.”
Feeling increasingly uncomfortable, I tried to change the subject, but he wasn’t finished talking. He said: “I’m a Canadian hockey player, Greg.”
I had no idea what he meant by that, but I had done my research and knew not only about his love for ice hockey, but also the name of his favourite team. I said: “Go Canucks!”
He either didn’t hear that comment or chose to ignore it.
“As my grandpa used to say all the time, ‘I don’t mind kissing your ass, but don’t s*** on my face when I do it.’”
I laughed, because that’s what I do when I’m frightened.
I asked what he would do if he were playing hockey and there was a fight. He didn’t hesitate. “I would have fought,” he said. “Of course. It’s part of the game.”
“Listen,” he said, “We’re not so simple as people would like to make us. We all have different parts of us. You’ve got to be able in life to stand up for yourself. And there are always moments where you take as much as you can and then you don’t anymore.”
Had he taken as much as he could from me? Did he think I was trying to make him simple for the purposes of this article? Had I pushed him too far? I asked if he was frustrated at being typecast.
He said: “You know, it’s funny, man. There’s no frustration. I don’t … Listen: The truth of the matter is, it only really happens, really in print, many times. And I say this to you with all due respect, – I don’t say ‘with all due respect’, so I can say something nasty – in every other way, in every other form of communication, people are able to see or hear me speak. They’re able to get context from the tone. In print, you or your editor may have already decided days or weeks ago exactly what this piece was going to be, and no matter what I f***ing say, you are just going to use whatever words I say to help form your essay.”
I tried not to take this as the personal attack I assumed it was. For one thing, I understood and appreciated his point. As a print journalist, I have the power (through questions, selection and ordering of quotes, the insertion of my own thoughts and feelings and beliefs) to represent an interview subject more or less however I want, which will almost inevitably be different from how they would do it. The situation is further compromised by the fact I’m contractually obligated to make my stories appeal to as wide an audience as possible and the things that attract the widest audience are, in order: Sex, celebrity gossip, catastrophic weather and the recipes of Annabel Langbein.
He is now famous enough that it’s unlikely anything written about him will make much of a difference to his career, but that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.
“When I was younger, it really bugged me,” he says. “It would drive me nuts. It would feel really personal: ‘Oh, how can they say that?’ But you get to a point where you’re 47 years old and you’re married with four kids, and you have a great career, and you go, ‘You know what? I know who I am, I know what I’m doing.’”
His way of dealing with what’s written about him now is to avoid it. Not only has he stopped reading about himself but he has placed himself inside a virtual cone of silence.
“My friends and family have been told in no uncertain terms: ‘If you call me and you share information that you’ve read, then your communication with me will be over.’ And I’m not kidding. Listen, man, I went through far more serious stuff in my life, and it was like, ignorance is bliss. I’m a good guy, I like me, and if somebody’s got something bad to say, there’s nothing good in me knowing it.”
He was 28 and had been grinding away relentlessly for years when his third album blew up, going platinum around the world and lifting him from the life of nightclub, shopping centre and cruise ship shows he had started to assume would be his lot.
What followed was a string of albums and hits that made him one of the world’s biggest music stars.
That was 20 years ago, but he says he’s even more ambitious now than when he started out. He recalls, as a young singer, asking a producer why some of his favourite artists were no longer performing or producing new work. The producer told him that they’d lost their sense of desperation.
“It’s hard work to stay on top,” Bublé says now. “It’s hard work to make great music or shows and make sure that that production is the best it can be. Listen, it’s way easier to sit at home and to eat good food and have the chef take care of you and take the helicopter wherever you go.”
He says that fame can stunt people’s growth, that they can freeze at the moment it happens. Much of his ongoing drive, he thinks, is a result of the fact fame came relatively much later in his life.
“It gets weird, man. There’s a point where you do have people around you, telling you that everything is good, and every decision, and it’s easy to get caught up in it. But I was already 28 years old.”
He was old enough to have developed a secure sense of who he was, and he was able to distinguish that version of himself from the one that would go on to play for crowds of 80,000 people. He sees it as a “dual life.
“I’m playing a part of someone I always wanted to be. It’s a wonderful sense of protection. I’m so cool up there. I’m untouchable. I’m an actor, and I play the part and the role of this guy. I’m a superhero. But that’s only two hours.”
It was only when I listened back to the recording of our conversation that I discovered my memory about our opening interaction hadn’t been completely accurate.
Just before my ingratiating opening question about his charm and charisma, I had delivered an ingratiating compliment – “I’m very excited to be talking with you,” to which he had replied, “Well I’m very excited to be talking with you, Greg.” Because he has never met me, and because I possess a healthy quantity of self-loathing, I laughed and said, sarcastically: “I’m sure you are! I can feel the sincerity in your voice!”
It was intended to be self-deprecating, a reference to the transactional nature of our relationship – why would he be excited to be talking with yet another faceless journalist for some far-flung publication? – but listening back, in the light of everything he said subsequently, I realised it had been a slap in the face and a direct challenge to his self-image.
Later in the interview, he told me that he and his long-time publicist have a running joke where, every time they meet, they ask each other what’s wrong: “The joke is that both of us are so overly sensitive that we’d always thought we’d pissed the other one off.”
“We make the joke about it because that’s me up there [on stage]. I care that much. And so if I see you and you look like your life sucks, I’m going to do my best to connect with you and make you feel important and make you feel like you matter to me and that you’re not just some husk, you’re not just a meat popsicle, that you’re a human being and that I see you and that I appreciate you being there.”
He had reached out to me and tried to make me feel important, in the same way he reaches out to his fans every time he’s up on stage and I had rejected his attempt. That was rude and I regret it. He will never read this story, and will cut off communication with you if you attempt to pass this message on to him, but I need to say it anyway: Michael Bublé, I’m genuinely and sincerely sorry. I should not have s*** on your face while you were kissing my ass.
Michael Bublé plays one night only at Spark Arena on Sunday, June 25.