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Michael Buble not quitting music, reps insist

By | Published on Monday 15 October 2018

Michael Buble

Representatives for Michael Buble have denied that he’s retiring from the music business. This despite him saying in an interview published at the weekend, “I’m retiring from the business”.

In the interview with the Daily Mail, Buble discusses his return to music with new album ‘Love’ after the two year break that followed his son Noah’s diagnosis with cancer. But despite that focus on the comeback, the interview includes the retirement claim.

In the piece, Buble reveals that he was falling out of love with music even before family circumstances necessitated the hiatus. This was mainly due to fears that he wasn’t actually very good, and that his career could all be taken away from him at some point.

“I woke up and thought, ‘After ten years of trying to get here and five years of being scared it would go away, I think I can’t enjoy it'”. He didn’t “have the stomach for it anymore”, he explains, “the celebrity narcissism – I started to crumble”. This made him wonder why he’d got into the performing lark in the first place. “I’d forgotten that it’s about souls connecting”, he says, “because I’d become so anxious”.

He goes on: “There were people in my business life saying, ‘If you hadn’t done this or that, or you’d written a better song, tickets might be selling quicker’. I started to take all that on board. No one wanted to take any responsibility. It was much easier for people to pass the buck to me because I was insecure enough already. I would digest it and say, ‘It’s my fault. I’m absolutely rubbish’. It affected me and I started to think, ‘It’s all going to go. I’m going to lose everything'”.

However, the break from music and the accompanying focus on his family has allowed him to leave all those things behind, he then said. So much so, his return now had been his decision, not something he was pressured into by label or management. Instead the decision to start making music again – leading to the new album – came about more naturally after his son had recovered.

“The two are inextricably linked, yet it wasn’t as straightforward as, ‘My son’s recovered, I should make an album'”, he says. “I’d told my manager I wanted to take a ten-year sabbatical, so I could hang out and be bad. But I missed the guys in my band. So … I said to them, ‘Come over to the house, let’s drink, order pizza, play video games and jam’. They came over, we partied and we said, ‘Let’s play some music’ I thought, ‘Wow! This is fun'”.

Later in the interview, he discusses the name of the album that came from that realisation, ‘Love’. He says: “There are three reasons I wanted to do this album. One, because I felt a debt of gratitude, deeper than I can explain, to the millions of people all over the world who prayed for us and showed us compassion. That gave me faith in humanity. Two, because I love music and feel I can continue the legacy of my idols. And three, because if the world was ending – not just my own personal hell but watching the political turmoil in America and watching Europe break up – there’s never a better time for music”.

Despite explaining how he’d grown to resent his career, but had then rediscovered his passion for performing following the two year break, he then adds: “This is my last interview. I’m retiring from the business. I’ve made the perfect record and now I can leave at the very top”.

Even the interviewer notes that this doesn’t seem likely. But that didn’t stop the story that Michael Buble is retiring – with some of the above quotes conflated for extra impact – from travelling around the world. Although, to be fair, he did say that he was retiring and that he’d now given his last interview.

Nonetheless, his PR people have gone into overdrive, denying that he’s doing any such thing. In a statement to Us Weekly, a spokesperson said: “He is absolutely not retiring. He is not going anywhere. He was talking about the emotions he was feeling during his son’s illness”.

As we have seen, he did very much talk about his emotions before and during his son’s illness. Though that doesn’t seem to be what he was doing in the section of the interview where the retirement statement is made. Unless that quote was moved or altered to make it seem otherwise. Which would obviously never happen. Not in a reputable paper like the Daily Mail.

Either way, another statement was then issued by the PR machine to a popular Michael Buble fan group on Facebook, saying: “The rumours and reports that Michael is quitting is completely false. We ask everyone to not share any of these tabloid stories and delete any posts already shared to the Buble Insider and personal pages”.

So there you go. Although, I’m still a bit confused about how the retirement line ended up in the Mail’s article. I guess we’ll have to wait for Buble’s next interview to find out what happened.



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