[UPDATE: Michael Buble’s management team announced in a Facebook post Sunday (Oct. 14) that the Canadian crooner would not be calling it quits on his career despite The Daily Mail’s report claiming otherwise. Buble’s management called the rumours and reports that the singer is quitting “completely false,” and asked people not to share any of the tabloid stories currently published.]
LONDON (CelebrityAccess) As one travels through cyberspace today [Sunday, Oct. 14], the story about Michael Bublé quitting the music business will be there like a game of wack-a-mole. It’s probably best to not take it too seriously.
It began here, with Bublé making an off-hand remark during an interview with the Daily Mail‘s Katy Storey and is now reemerging at places like Fox 8 News in Cleveland (“Michael Bublé retires from music following son’s life-changing battle with cancer”) and even the oft-times reliable Daily Beast (“Michael Bublé Says He’s Leaving Music Following Son’s Battle With Cancer”) and Huffington Post (“Michael Bublé Says He’s Retiring From Music After His Son’s Cancer Fight”).
However, readers may benefit from taking a deep breath and coming to grips that we are living in a climate of click-bait headlines that do not reflect the context of the story. Or, as it were, that a headline can travel around the world while Michael Bublé is still putting on his shoes.
Storey spoke at length with Bublé and his change of spirit and loss of interest in celebrity lifestyle after his son’s battle with liver cancer. His son, Noah, now five, motivated Bublé to remove himself from the spotlight. Now that Noah’s cancer is in remission, Bublé is making the press rounds for his upcoming 10th album.
He makes no bones that he is done with the shallow lifestyle of the famous and is looking for something more, through less (“I don’t have the stomach for it any more. The celebrity narcissism.”). He said this album may be his last, which he did partly out of gratitude to the fans, to the “millions of people all over the world who prayed for us and showed us compassion. That gave me faith in humanity.”
The whopper comes at the very end, the second-to-last sentence, buried literally more than 60 paragraphs down:
Then suddenly he stops. ‘This is my last interview,’ he says quite solemnly. ‘I’m retiring from the business. I’ve made the perfect record and now I can leave at the very top.’
And that’s where the headlines end, except Storey follows with the following, last sentence, which could reflect Bublé’s mischievous interview style:
Somehow, though, I don’t think he really means it.
In the article, the Daily Mail notes that Bublé is working with James Corden on a Carpool Karaoke special for the Stand Up To Cancer fundraising campaign. There are also notes of joyfulness, the love of playing and performing music:
When he learned Noah was in remission, the joy returned to Michael’s world. Is that when the urge to make music again hit him?
‘The two are inextricably linked, yet it wasn’t as straightforward as, “My son’s recovered, I should make an album,”’ he explains. ‘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 once when (wife) Luisana had to go back to Argentina 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.”’
