SINGER MICHAEL BUBLE CANDIDLY OPENS UP ABOUT HIS FAMILY’S TOUGH TIMES
MICHAEL BUBLE CANDIDLY OPENS UP ABOUT HIS FAMILY’S TOUGH TIMES, HIS MUSIC HIATUS AND HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS CHILDREN
After almost 20 years in the music industry, Michael Bublé is undoubtedly one of the world’s best-loved stars. The multi-grammy Award winner’s tenth album, Love, hit the shelves last year, and he’s just hit the road for his sixth world tour.
While his career has gone from strength to strength, the 43 year old tied the knot with Argentinian actress Luisana Lopilato, 31, in 2011, and the couple are now parents to sons Noah, five, Elias, three, and eight-month-old daughter Vida.
But the past three years have been incredibly tough for the young family. In 2016, Michael and Luisana’s ‘world ended’, when their eldest son Noah was diagnosed with liver cancer, hepatoblastoma. After being told that his young son’s diagnosis was ‘not good’, Michael subsequently took a hiatus from his professional commitments as Noah underwent chemotherapy. He has since admitted: ‘I’d much rather it’d have been me. I wished that many times, I wished that it happened to me.’
Thankfully, little Noah has now recovered. And though he has returned to work, the ordeal has put things into perspective for Michael. He says: ‘I don’t even think about my career. It is zero on the scale of things to care about.’
Here, the superstar talks touring with his kids, life lessons and staying humble...
How does touring life work now you’re a dad? My kids love it. They’re actually coming with me on tour. They all come along. I set it up so that they come, and when my wife has a film, I schedule it so I get time off and take the kids on set to watch her. It’s a lot of fun.
Having welcomed a daughter, is your relationship with her different to your sons? I love my boys and I’m close with my boys, but it’s not the same as with my daughter. Everyone told me it would be different, and I was like: ‘No, no it won’t be.’ And it’s different. She looks at me with those big blue eyes and I’m toast. You emerged in the early noughties, when hip-hop and rap/rock were prominent. What made you believe you could break through as somebody crooning songs from a bygone era?
It was probably stupidity [laughs]. But honest to God, I think I was blinded by the love of the music. And by the way, I love all kinds of music. For me, if it’s good, it’s good. There are times where I think to myself, my God, I worked at visualising and putting out all of that stuff to the universe, and it worked. But then there are a lot of times where I have to say to myself that I was just so lucky. The question that I really ask myself is, if I had to do it all over again, would I be brave enough?
‘What I’ve learned Is how much I don’t know’
So... would you?
No. I don’t think so. Yesterday we had to take our son to his check-up, the scans and everything. We take him every three months, and it’s really scary. My wife and I actually talked about this and we said: ‘My God, look what we did.’ She was 23 years old and I was 32. We met in Argentina and we fell in love. Everyone told us that it was impossible, the whole longdistance relationship thing. And we did it. We got married. And then we had kids, then there’s what happened to our family. One of the first things a doctor told me at one of the hospitals we’d gone to was to stay strong and help each other through this. Something like 92 per cent of couples who go through this get divorced.
Wow, that’s high…
And many of the eight per cent who don’t, don’t have more children. And of course, my wife and I thought here we are with a beautiful daughter. We were in the car recently and I looked at her, and said: ‘Would you do it all over again?’ She then answered: ‘Of course I would do it all over again. I wouldn’t want anything different. You guys are the greatest joy of my life.’ But then my question to her was: ‘But would you be brave
enough to do it all over again?’ And then she said: ‘I don’t know.’ And I would have to say the same thing. I don’t know.
It’s hard to accept you don’t have the power to completely shield your children from the pain and discomfort of life…
And you don’t have the power to shield them from yourself. I thought to myself: ‘He’s going to be better than I am!’ I’m so flawed and impatient, and there are so many things that I wish I could improve on. And then you go: ‘Oh my God, he’s acting exactly like me!’
You’ve said you thought the hiatus you took to deal with your son’s health could have been for good. What was the reason for you coming back?
He was better. We didn’t know how it was going to turn out. My heart was broken, I don’t know. It wasn’t that I ever fell out of love with music. I just didn’t know if I had it in me to go out there and be joyful. It just wasn’t something I could turn on.
What do you think you are here in this life to learn?
I’m still learning a lot. What scares me is I’ve learned so much more in the past five years than I had in all my previous years combined. What I’ve learned is how much I don’t know. It sounds weird, but just be kind, be loving, forgive and try to get through this very short life. Especially when you have kids, you hope your actions are louder than your words. ‘LOVE’ IS OUT NOW. FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TICKETS FOR MICHAEL’S 2019 WORLDWIDE TOUR, VISIT WWW.MICHAELBUBLE.COM/ TOUR OR WWW.TICKETMASTER.COM.