“It sounds like a cliché when I say this,” Michael Bublé admits at the beginning of this week’s Spotify Under Cover podcast. “But the songs pick me, as much as I pick the songs. I think if you asked me and gave me a truth serum what I’m best at or where my talent lies, I’d probably say it’s in the reimagining and conceptualizing how to recreate songs, probably in a very cinematic and visual way.”
The first time Bublé first heard the song “Buona Sera” was the Dean Martin version. “Dean was my favorite,” he gushes. “Out of all the singers, I think I felt like he was always someone who made it seem like it was effortless, even though I know it wasn’t. He just happened to be an incredibly talented human being.” Bublé concedes that while he’s not Italian-American, he grew up listening to Martin, Louis Prima and other famous Italian singers in his home. “The truth is I came from a very Italian—I know I’m Canadian, but a Canadian family with Italian extraction.”
“One of my favorite things about today was the looseness involved,” Bublé says of recording the classic at Spotify studios in New York. “I just wanted to ask the engineers how it must be for them to be able to have some of the most iconic, intelligent acts in the whole world coming here and reimagining their stuff and having this sense of joy and getting to explore.”