Do you remember this look? It’s the look David gave the Snarky Archies when asked if he’d like to follow in the footsteps of … Michael Bublé. (I recall they even took that clip and replayed it in slow-motion to the creepy violins from Psycho, lol.)

Anywayyy, I’ve been seeing a lot of tweets flying by hoping that when David comes back he takes a “young Bublé” path. My take on that is NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

Don’t get me wrong, love Michael! (Don’t buy his cds but appreciate his talent and showmanship… and heck, he’s practically the honourary Prime Minister here.)

Maybe in 10 or 15 years, David could go the crooner route, but puh-lease, not yet! To me, David’s way too original and versatile for that… he also crackles with energy, and has that Latin soul and fire electrifying everything he does.

Anyway, I’m probably in the minority… but for those of you who look at Bublé now and see what a huge success he is worldwide, you might not realize the struggles he had to get there. He’s always been pretty successful here in Canada (radio stations have to play a certain percentage of home-grown music), but at David’s age, he was about to give up music altogether to study journalism.

Then, at 25, singing at a corporate event, he was noticed by an aide to then-PM Brian Mulroney, who wrangled Michael a gig singing for the PM’s daughter’s wedding.

Producer David Foster was a guest at the “royal” wedding. But even though Bublé’s music is right up Foster’s alley (easy-listening), Foster was reluctant to sign him to his label because he “didn’t know how to market this kind of music” (acc. to Wikipedia!)… hmmm. So Bublé had to raise $500,000 on his own to cover the costs of production before Foster would sign him.

The album didn’t come out until 2003 (Bublé was 28 by then) and it did really well here in Canada (in the top 10) but only top 50 in the U.S.

Only after plugging at it album after album, and updating his sound (which was originally very old-school big band), did he finally achieve wider success. What’s even more amazing to me is that I still remember when, even here, Bublé was once considered uncool… sort of a bland Sinatra-lite. But by not giving up, working hard, keeping up with the times without losing himself, touring and touring some more, he proved he had staying power and is actually now considered cool. Remarkable.

He also comes to mind because I read an article in the paper here last week called “Michael Bublé and how autotune became the Botox of pop music,” in which he said this about autotune:

“I think it’s brilliant… For a pop song, I love it.”

For the multiple Grammy and Juno winner, affection for Auto-Tune is not so much a genuine embrace of the technology as a matter of how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. “I need to get on pop radio,” he explains. “And if my songs don’t sound like all the other songs, I’m not getting on pop radio.”

Sad, right? … also interesting, Michael told Oprah in an interview that when he was a teenager, he slept with his Bible and prayed to become a singer. 🙂

I would, however, love to see David do a publicity stunt like this someday…