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New album focuses on best, worst parts of relationships

      It's been an exhilarating ride to the top for Michael Buble.
      "It's amazing," Buble said, "because if you asked me five years ago, I probably wouldn't have had the foresight to tell you that things would be going this well all over the world."
      But they are. Barely home from Australia, Buble spoke to the Deseret Morning News by phone as was about to embark on a two-month tour of the United States. "I'm a little bummed out, I'm a little sentimental. I just got in the car to drive to the airport. It's always a little bit sentimental leaving your hometown, leaving your family and knowing that you're going to be gone for a couple of months."
      Buble's tour follows the release of his most recent CD, "Call Me Irresponsible." "Really, this was my remark on the state of love. When I say that, I mean that you're either in it, and it's the greatest thing in the world, or you're out of it, and it's the worst. And when you say 'love,' I think people instinctively think one thing. I think you forget, maybe, that it can be rough.
      "I called it 'Call Me Irresponsible' because I thought that you have to be irresponsible to fall in love — but is there anything better than when you're irresponsibly crazy about someone? Is there anything better than that?"
      Buble said he knows about such things from experience, and he's put two songs on the album that he penned himself: "Lost," and "Everything." "'Lost' was written when I was in Australia. I had come out of a long relationship, and, you know, it inspired how I was feeling, and I wrote the song hoping it wouldn't be a sad song, but maybe more of a hopeful song for love that didn't work out."
      "Everything" was written when he was just 16 or 17. Originally, he said, it was a lullaby, but when he sat down with his musical director, they decided to up the tempo. "We changed the feel, and I just wanted it to be a very '70s kind of summer, really easy-going, tune. It's an analogy of what this person is to you, this person in this crazy life that we live — that person who keeps it all together for you."
      As a rule, Buble said, he doesn't write songs for anyone in particular — at least that he'll admit. The idea is that each listener takes what they want out of the song. "I think the second that you make it about someone in particular, it loses its generic ability to have everyone get involved in it."
      When he made his first album, Buble felt a lot of pressure to find a duet partner that would bring "heat" to the record. "No one would do it with me. I mean, what did they care, this little schmuck had sold no records and what was he doing at the time? Oh, it's some Sinatra schtick thing.
      "People kept saying to me, 'You need the heat. We need someone who brings heat to the record.' And I remember sitting there saying, 'Listen, if this isn't a good record, I don't care who I have on the record, there's going to be no heat. We have to create the heat."'
      And create the heat he has.
      On his new album, Buble has chosen to bring on Boyz II Men for "Comin' Home Baby" and Brazilian singer Ivan Lins for a bossa-nova update of Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight." This time, it's Buble himself who is bringing the heat to the album. "I love that whole thing of mixing a song that was a hit in 1961 with a group that had a huge start in the '80s, and with a kid that sort of had his start in 2006. I thought it was kind of cool to bring all those things together."
      And on "Wonderful Tonight," he said, "how cool is it that here I am, 30 years old from Canada, and I'm singing a song with a 60-year-old man from across the world in Brazil, and he's singing in his language and I'm singing in mine, and we have a perspective that's different because we're from a different generation, and yet we tell a story and it means the exact same thing to both of us. There's a connection there.
      "The thing on this record is, I wanted to show growth without alienating the audience — that's important to me. I didn't want to do the exact same thing. But at the same time, I didn't want to pull a 180. So I tried to make tougher choices. I didn't choose the easiest songs to do or the most well-known."