Yahoo Lifestyle Why Michael Bublé had to include the “Spider-Man” theme song on his new album, “The Best of Bublé”
The pop and jazz crooner shares the stories behind some of his favorite tracks — and the one he doesn't particularly enjoy singing.
Michael Bublé is Peter Parker.
Not literally, of course. And not even cinematically (that honor belongs to Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, among others). But the crooner likens the gap between his real self and his onstage persona to the one between Parker and your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
"I wanted to be Spider-Man," he tells Entertainment Weekly. "I still think I'm Spider-Man. I am a huge comic book nerd. I always thought it was cool that on stage I became my alter ego — Peter Parker was me in real life and Spider-Man was me on stage."
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That doesn't mean it was easy convincing his producers that he should record the song and include it on multiple albums, including his latest collection, The Best of Bublé, which is available now on digital and CD (and will receive a special vinyl release on Nov. 22). In fact, it might have been almost as challenging as fighting a super-villain. "The producer hated it," Bublé explains of recording the track back in the early 2000s. "He didn't get it or the cultural relevance of it. He's like, 'Yeah, man. I thought it was kind of stupid.'"
The song was featured in the closing credits of 2004's Spider-Man 2 and went on to become one of Bublé's first singles. Which actually worked against the singer initially. "The girl who worked for the record company, her job was to guesstimate the amount of copies I would sell in my lifetime," he recalls. "She had guessed that I would do from 50 to 150,000 copies. And I asked her recently [why she lowballed it so much], and she said, 'Chicken, your first f---ing single was "Spider-Man." What was I supposed to think?'"
Regardless of what the record company thought, the song has remained a personal favorite for Bublé and his fans. "I put 'Spider-Man' on the 'Best Of' record because my kids listened to that song 50 billion times," he says. "And there is not an Uber ride or a trip to a shopping mall that someone doesn't walk up to me and say, 'Oh my God, my kids listen to "Spider-Man" 62 times a day.' It was like, 'Come on, this has to go on there.'"
Bublé took that highly personal approach while crafting the track list on The Best of Bublé, which features 21 songs, including some of his most beloved numbers and the previously unreleased "Don't Blame It on Me" and "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas."
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'The Best of Bublé'"I didn't want to do a greatest hits — I wanted to do a best-of," he says, clarifying that the songs he chose aren't necessarily the ones that got the most radio play. "It was really more important for me to share in a sentimental way the songs that were my favorites and ones that had emotional value."
"It's very personal," he continues. "There's not a song on there that the record company [chose]. It was me going, 'This one and this one.' They weren't all the biggest hits, but they meant something to me. The common denominator is a connection with an audience. As Maya Angelou said, 'People will never remember what you did or said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel.' And I always keep that in my head."
With that in mind, Bublé walks us through the stories behind some of those songs, and why he chose to feature them.
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"Cry Me a River" and "Feeling Good"
Both of these songs reflect Bublé's love of the movies and desire to give that level of grandeur to his interpretation of American standards. "It is a recurring theme," he explains. "With 'Feeling Good,' I had this idea to create this James Bond–esque theme. There's always a cinematic idea between each of the arrangements. It's what I do best."
"It's a scientific impossibility for something to come from nothing," he adds. "I get to walk into a room with nothing, and somehow I bend the laws of the universe. We as musicians, as filmmakers, as writers get to walk in with absolutely nothing and walk out with something."
"Don't Blame It on Me"
Bublé wrote the track for his previous album, 2022's Higher, but ultimately he was talked out of including it. "I'm an idiot," he says with a laugh. "I listened to people and they said to me, 'Oh, you have this song and this song,' and I should have put that song on the record. That song is so Michael Bublé. It's a great f---ing song. But thank God now I can put it out and give it the love it deserves."
With its New Orleans jazz flavor, the song is also a tribute to one of Bublé's favorite artists, the guy who brought back the concept of the crooner before him — Harry Connick Jr. "I don't know that anybody loves Harry Connick Jr. as much as I do," Bublé gushes. "He's such a hero. Red Light, Blue Light is one of my favorite records of all time. I've always loved that New Orleans swing, and I've always loved Elvis. Elvis was my number one. So it also has that little bit of rockabilly. It's not the first time or the last time that I'll create this hybrid of pop and jazz. It's just what moves me."
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"Quizas, Quizas, Quizas"
Many know this song as its English title, "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps." It's another shelved track from the Higher album — one Bublé also regrets not including. He recorded it as a tribute to his wife, who is from Argentina. "My wife is the greatest thing that ever happened to me," he says. "We've gone through hell, and when you go through hell and s--- hits the fan, you find out who you're dealing with. And I'm dealing with the boss. I love Latin culture. In my house, we speak Spanish, and I love the music and the food. I love that even though I speak like a caveman, I can converse in it. I'm a Canadian dude, so the fact that I could put out a song in Spanish, and that I didn't suck, is pretty amazing."
Bublé credits its success to songwriter-producer Jason Goldman's work on it. "He might have arranged one of the greatest contemporary big-band arrangements that we've ever heard," Bublé says of the song. "It is so raunchy and sexy."
It already has one major fan besides Bublé. "Derek Hough heard it the other day," Bublé says. "He came to visit us and the second he heard it, I watched his wheels turning. He was doing this stuff with his hands where I could see him choreographing and twisting. He looked at me, and he goes, 'Can you send this to me? Can I do this on Dancing With the Stars?'"
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"Everything"
Bublé worked on this track from 2007's Call Me Irresponsible with his frequent collaborators Alan Chang, Amy Foster-Gillies, and Bob Rock. But he wrote the first version of it when he was only 17 years old. "When I wrote it, it was in waltz time," he recalls. "My co-writer at the time, Alan Chang, I remember him sitting on a plane and he said to me, 'Mike, you know that intro? What if we double-time it?' We had shared headphones, and I remember looking across from him and saying, 'Dude, we're going to have a huge hit.' So then I knew I had to change the lyrics. At that time I was dating somebody, and it was all about the analogies of, 'Who is this person? They're this or that.'''
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"Haven't Met You Yet"
One of Bublé's most beloved original songs, this track off 2009's Crazy Love began with a brainstorming session with his collaborators. "[I was] sitting in my house with Amy and Alan, talking about writing a song that inspired love," he recalls. "Alan would get into these loops, and he came up and started to play this. I started to sing, and Amy said, 'Why don't we write about meeting somebody?' And she started talking about when you're grocery shopping and you only go to buy food, but when you least expect it, that's when you meet the person. It didn't take us long. We sat there and started to write, and we came up with that soaring chorus."
"Haven't Met You Yet" was so fully realized that they began discussing a potential music video for it before they even finished writing it. "I remember Amy saying, 'Oh my God, you've got to start the video where we can see the squeaky wheel, because I always get a goddamn squeaky wheel on the cart,'" Bublé recalls. "And that's how the video starts."
"It's a Beautiful Day"
This single, off 2013's To Be Loved, was another original from Bublé, Chang, and Foster — but instead of it being an ode to love, like so much of his music, it's a cheery kiss-off to an unfaithful partner. "It came out of a time in my life where I had come out of a really meaningful relationship," he says. "That was therapeutic for me, trying to tell myself that I was okay, and trying to advocate for anyone else who had gone through their own heartache that it's going to be okay. It came from what my grandpa used to say to me over and over again, 'Today's curse is tomorrow's blessing.' And I would look at him like he was crazy. It's one of those things where only time, maturity, and life experience would show me that he was right. It's always going to be okay somehow."
"That song for me was an interesting one artistically," he adds. "Because I had written it on the piano, and I'm a feeble piano player. I had gone to my co-writer Alan and he did not like the song. To this day, I don't think he does. He was like, 'That's it?' He felt like there was such simplicity there."
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"Home"
For his 2005 album, It's Time, Bublé released his first original track, "Home." The song, which he wrote early in his career, came to him in the shower. "I was on tour in Italy, and one of my friends said to me, 'You just have to open up your mind to the universe, and God will drop a song into it,'" Bublé recalls. "I remember being in the shower and going, 'Alright, God, drop the song.' And literally, I just started singing it: 'Another summer day has come and gone away in Paris or Rome, but I want to go home.' I remember getting out of the shower and thinking, 'Did I steal this?' It was so complete."
"Home" did not impress Chang either. "He was like, 'That ending is so predictable. We know you're going to go to that chord,'" Bublé says. "And I would be like, 'Yeah, isn't it great?'" But in a sense, Chang had the last laugh, which Bublé realized has he matured as a musician and performer. "My mind wanted that simplicity," he says. "But what I found fascinating was that later in our songwriting relationship, when he would come up with his ideas, they became my all-time favorite songs. Weirdly, the more complicated they were, the longer I liked them. And songs like 'Home,' which I will sing with a love for my audience for the rest of my life, isn't my favorite."
That's right. Even though he included "Home" on his best-of album, Bublé is kind of over it. "I don't hate it," he clarifies. "But I would probably say out of all of them, 'Home' isn't my number-one pick. It means a lot to me that it means a lot to people. A lot of servicemen and servicewomen tell me that this song is an anthem for them. Sometimes it's helpful for me before I sing it to say, 'I would like to dedicate this to those servicemen or servicewomen who have fought for freedom.' Emotionally it helps me because, just functionally as a songwriter, you grow and you change."
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.
