"Are these the guys I have to be nice to?" Michael Bublé put on a look of mock apprehension as he asked the question. We were all standing on the corridor by his suite at the Shangri-La, for someone had locked the door by mistake. He suggested holding the interview right there, but soon the staff came with the keys. He ushered us in, offered us a drink (which we refused), feigned inebriation ("Sho, what do I really think of David Foshter? . . .")–and we knew that, like a well-fed pet puppy, Michael Bublé aims to please.
The task didn’t seem like a tall order for him. His boy-band features certainly work to his advantage. Seated across us, wearing a black blazer, his hair disheveled with gelled deliberation, the sunshine streaming in from the bay window behind him, he looked like a chubbier Matt Dillon.
He has other instruments, though, besides good looks.
Earlier, at the press conference, he had regaled reporters with his answers: free, funny and flattering. What would he be doing if he weren’t singing? He’d be in the media, "so I could be like you guys... . you’re very classy." What’s his all-time favorite book? "I don’t think I’ve read anything more than comic books ... but I’m reading Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men." How would he rate Filipino musicians? "I’d rate them with numbers." When he was asked what romantic song he would sing to "the girl of his dreams," he sung the first lines of The Girl from Ipanema, only changing Ipanema to Manila. (It’s a trick he would play again at the Podium when, singing Come Fly with Me, he would say "Manila land" instead of "lava land.") At winning people over, Michael Bublé didn’t seem like a novice at all.
Then, there is "the Filipino connection." First, he mentioned his Filipino friends in Vancouver (which, because of its large Filipino community, he thought, could be Manila), including a Jonathan Cruz from whom he learned the expression "Bahala na." Then, he said he would like to work with Martin Nivera, who he thinks is "very charming and sexy." Most of all, however, was the value that he placed on the family. "The reason I’m who I am," he said, "is that I was raised by a warm family who gave me unconditional love. My father and my grandfather never had a million dollars and never sold a million records, but they are the most successful people I know. ... Even if you fail, your family loves you." He recalled that it was his grandfather, a plumber, who encouraged him to learn the standards. Nobody would sign him, because the music was "old." Still, his grandfather persisted ("My grandson is going to bring it back!"), even offering prospective producers his plumbing services for free. One day his grandfather came to him teary eyed: Michael was being signed by Warner Brothers. "When people didn’t believe in me, and when I didn’t believe in me, my grandfather still did. He never had a doubt"–material for an episode of Tanging Ina.
And finally, as if to prove he was not a fuddy-duddy, he rapped a rapid rap about shaking one’s "bootie" on the dance floor. "We’re immature," he explained to the surprised guests, "We like to party. We just happen to like these old songs."
"A young man who’s sincere about loving his music, and who’s luko-loko"–that was his succinct self-description; and if he is all the things he says he is, then one would be archly severe, indeed, not to like him.
"Michael Bublé, you suck!" He was pretending to be me writing about his CD. I had assured him that I had written something positive, but his razzing went on, so that John Labella, the Palanca-winning poet who was with me during the interview, guessed that he was fishing for details. "I hate your CD. My critique said that you were an impersonator of an impersonator!"
"Are you?"
"No, please God!"
No, it would be cruel to cross him out as simply another Frank Sinatra clone, perhaps more musical than your ordinary beerhouse/videoke-bar balladeer but a clone nonetheless. At least twice during the gala concert at the Meralco two days later, he would play the mimic; but one had to acknowledge his attempts to make the songs his own. His version of Fever, he explained, is different from other singers’, perhaps not in the vocalization but in the instrumentation. "I wanted to make it more edgy, more young, a little hip, a little fresh," he said, so he had the track re-mixed, adding more percussion and punctuating some verses with more brass. To value being "edgy," "young," "hip," "fresh"–there, one surmises, is the spirit of Bublé’s age reshaping, however slightly, the songs of another age.
"All we can do really," he said, "is to love the music and be sincere when singing the words. That’s how you make it your own."
Sincerity is a word that recurs in a Michael Bublé interview, and sincerity is a principle that informs his singing. It’s clear that Bublé is sincere about loving the music; he didn’t transform from pop star to crooner to be in business ("This is who I’ve been my whole life, and whether I fail or succeed, it’s who I’ll continue to be"). Still, sincerity is a slippery concept when the business in question is show business. When he was recording Put Your Head on My Shoulders (with Paul Anka watching), he was thinking about one of his first crushes. "I closed my eyes and pretended that I was singing it to her."
"That’s the sincerity part?"
"That’s the sincerity part–just believing what you’re singing."
But, it was tempting to protest, isn’t that precisely being insincere, to pretend that one is singing to somebody not there? Earlier, he had made a comparison between singing and acting, which sounded self-contradictory: "It’s no different than an actor reading lines on a piece of paper. They’re just lines on a piece of paper, but if you believe in them when you say them, then you force your audience to believe with you."
It was later when he started talking about what he had been doing before getting a record deal that his meaning became clearer. He had sung standards, he said, so many times–aboard cruise ships, in shopping malls, in bars, even for singing telegrams ("all the things that were hard on your ego")–that "they became part of me, they became part of my skin, so now when I sing them, I’ve lived them."
"But doesn’t it get mechanical, singing the same..."
"No, it gets more beautiful... When I start singing, I’m thinking that (the song), I’m feeling that. In my mind, I’m thinking about what I’m saying."
Perhaps, then, by sincerity he simply meant authenticity: singing with empathy, connecting with the words. That could be it, for at the Meralco, he would be most persuasive singing That’s All: it was a moment when singer and song matched. Having reminded the audience of his working class background (he comes from a line of salmon fishers), he sang the song with a feeling that didn’t appear put on: "I can only give you country walks in springtime / And a hand to hold when leaves begin to fall; / And a love whose burning light / Will warm the winter’s night / That’s all. / There are those I am sure who have told you, / They would give you the world for a toy. / All I have are these arms to enfold you, / And a love time can never destroy."
But in the end, it would be his sheer exuberance and his winsome manner that made the concert a success. When he was asked at the press conference to describe his concert, he replied, "It should be a party. It should be music, just me jamming along with my guys in the band, and you just happened to be drinking and hanging out with me... We should be close. You guys should be singing along. I should be in the audience with you. We should be taking pictures of each other."
It was an accurate description of what would happen at the Meralco and at the Podium. He would prove himself a complete showman, rapping the same rap (but with back-up this time), interspersing humorous patter between numbers ("I want to tell you something in Canadian . . ."), stepping down from the stage to take a picture with a woman in the audience (when taking pictures had been expressly prohibited), even kissing Fritz Ynfante on the lips (at which news my editor wrote, "Bading ba ’yun? I don’t mean Fritz"). At the Podium, he would sing into a spectator’s cellphone and enjoin the audience to sing along.
"Showmanship is more important than just singing pretty," he declared at the press conference. "A lot of people can sing, but I don’t see a lot of people putting on a good show. I strive to entertain." In his case, there would be no such binary (though there’s another riddle: is there sincerity in showmanship?), for he would prove to be a better singer on stage than on record. To end the gala concert, he would sing the last verses of My Funny Valentine a cappella, with the microphone two feet away (that distance, once remarked Barbra Streisand, produces the best sound, "the most pure, the most unmechanical"), and his voice would bloom in the dark, quite like the first flower of Genesis.
By that time, it wouldn’t really matter whether he really was sincere or not, or that we had seen some of his gags before. We would be thoroughly charmed, and he would have done more than just please. Michael Bublé would have impressed.