Michael Buble Creates a Classic Christmas Album

I’ve been vaguely aware of Canadian crooner Michael Bublé for several years, but it wasn’t until I discovered his exuberant Haven’t Met You Yet last year that I really became a fan. When I heard he was releasing a solo album, I was quite excited to hear what he would come up with, and the David Foster-produced Christmas is just as fun as I hoped it would be.

The album includes plenty of classic standards, starting off with It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, which isn’t recognizable as such until half a minute in because of the lush instrumental introduction. From there on, it’s a smooth, straightforward rendition that sounds like it could have been recorded in the 1950s. The most interesting variation here is the slight uplift on the second syllable in “Christmas” toward the end of the song. Holly Jolly Christmas is similarly traditional and upbeat with a fun guitar solo in the middle making me feel like getting up and dancing like the kids in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The Puppini Sisters join Michael for a rather annoying version of Jingle Bells. It’s similar to the Bing Crosby / Andrews Sisters rendition that always makes me cringe a little when it comes on the radio. I’m not sure why it bugs me so much; I just find some of the women’s harmonic contributions grating, and that’s the same here. Lots of scatting that just starts to sound cacophonous. It’s a very energetic track, and some will probably find it very entertaining, but I’m not a big fan. Michael has another guest on Mis Deseos/Feliz Navidad, with Thalía joining him for a mostly-Spanish song. This guitar-heavy track is a lot of fun, even when I have no idea what they are saying. The chorus of joyful voices that joining toward the end adds to an already harmonious merger.

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town is nice and jazzy with a brassy, big band-style instrumental break partway through. The steady percussion and bass gives the remainder of the song a lounge quality that is enjoyable and distinct. His spoken line toward the end about “the big fat man with the long white beard” is especially fun. Speaking of the big guy with the beard, he’s the addressee in Santa Baby, one of my least favorite songs this time of year because of the unbridled avarice that is Christmas materialism at its most galling. That said, Michael’s version is a lot less irritating than, say, Madonna’s, which always makes me roll my eyes. This one is so slow and quiet, with few of the obnoxious inflections typical to this song. I also like some of the lyrical changes, such as calling Santa “buddy” and “dude” and requesting Canucks tickets.

Michael’s rendition of White Christmas seems to have been modeled after the Drifters version, which was featured in Home Alone. Shania Twain joins him for this peppy, doo-woppy track. This is a song that usually comes across as sentimental and rather woebegone, but there’s none of that sense here until perhaps the very end. The brass and pounding drums make it sound like this is a parade coming through town to announce that snow is on the way just because the majority demands it. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, on the other hand, sounds just as wistful as when Judy Garland sang it. Violins are particularly prominent here, while guitar is just as effective at conveying heartache in I'll Be Home for Christmas, which starts off drenched in despairing homesickness but sounds much more optimistic on the second repetition.

It’s no surprise that Michael would tap into the subgenre of romantic Christmas songs here, and I really like his mostly low-key take on All I Want for Christmas Is You. Backed by piano, he sounds quiet and sincere, and the outburst late in the song feels genuinely emotional. In most versions of this song, I’m a bit worn out by the exuberance by this point, especially since the lyrics are so plaintive. He really does sound mildly melancholy – lonely without the one he loves but optimistic that she will appear soon. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) has the typical mix of anguish and pep. The jingle bells, electric guitar and backing vocals add to the energy of the track, which he sings the heck out of. I also find it fun that the backers echo the Beatles’ “love, love, love” chorus that Michael used in Haven’t Met You Yet. Blue Christmas sounds a bit odd with the clanging tambourine and the ostentatious brass section, and with him whooping and hollering in the background during the instrumental portions, he sure doesn’t sound blue to me. Maybe he’s trying to sound sarcastic? An interesting track, but it doesn’t quite do it for me.

My favorite Christmas albums tend to be those with a hearty mix of sacred and secular songs. This album features only two spiritual songs, and as the first one doesn’t show up until the tenth track, by the time I got to it the first time around, I figured that Michael must have decided to stick with the Santa side of Christmas, along with the cozy domestic end of it. Perhaps the album would feel a bit more balanced if Silent Night had been a few tracks earlier. It’s a lovely, reverent version, mostly because of the children’s choir, but it seems very strange to encounter it after nine tracks that don’t mention Jesus at all. The other track is Ave Maria, which is mostly about Mary and is in Latin. This song seems to be best tackled by those with operatic voices, but Michael does a nice job with it, and the austere chorus in the background is especially nice. While the fact that there are only two makes them seem a tad perfunctory, he does pull out all the stops with the production here.

Cold December Night is the only original track on the album, and it’s along the lines of All I Want for Christmas and all those other songs about romantic Yuletide proposals. It’s an upbeat song, so the implication I get is that he thinks he has a pretty decent shot of being accepted, though “fall in love with me” suggests that at this point, he is probably more invested in the possibility of romance than she is. In any case, it’s a chipper way to put his personal stamp on the album, which he also does at the very end with a five-second-long spoken “Merry Christmas” message.

While there are a couple tracks that haven’t entirely won me over yet, this is a nice album and precisely the sort of thing I would expect to hear from Michael Bublé. In the acknowledgments, he talks about how Christmas is his favorite time of year and how he wanted this album to be a throwback to the days of the crooners, particularly Bing Crosby, whose Christmas music so inspired him as a kid. Although this album includes a few fairly contemporary songs, it has a very old-school feel, so it should be warmly welcomed by those who fill their Christmas turntables with the likes of Bing, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis. With Michael Bublé’s Christmas, it feels like we’ve stepped back in time, and it’s a very pleasant trip.

Michael Buble Brightens Up the Radio With the Exuberant Haven't Met You Yet

I’m not someone who often gets swept away by new music. Aside from the occasional new album by a beloved artist, usually there will only be a handful of new songs per year that really capture my imagination. Last year, three isolated songs stood head and shoulders above the rest. The first was I’ll Never Be Lost Again, the epic hip-hop ode to my favorite television series incorporating Michael Giacchino’s Of Mice and Ben from the season four soundtrack. The third was I See the Light, the Mandy Moore / Zachary Levi duet from Tangled that accompanied one of the most gorgeous animated sequences that Disney has ever produced. And then there was Haven’t Met You Yet, the chipper Michael Buble song that stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it playing on the mall radio during an evening shift in the calendar kiosk.

Unlike the other two songs, Haven’t Met You Yet actually came out the year before, but I rarely listen to contemporary music on the radio and had never come across it. When I heard it for the first time, I was struck by a few things. I noticed the insistent pounding of the piano; so many of my favorite songs feature prominent piano backing, and in this case, you really can’t miss it. That piano was a part of the overall feeling of peppiness that emanated from the song, which was extremely refreshing among the bleak radio landscape in which most of the dreary ballads made me feel down in the dumps – when I could make out the words. What made the biggest impression on me that first time around, though, was a guy who looked to be 17 or so strutting along with that too-cool-for-school look that so many teenage boys at the mall seem to have, only to break out into a sort of prance when this song hit the chorus and sing along with jubilant abandon: “I promise you, kid, to give so much more than I get; I just haven’t met you yet.”

The song just has that sort of effect on people, so when I saw the video a couple of months later, I smiled at the sense of authenticity. It takes place in a grocery store, nondescript aside from the name: Killarney Market. Those words, accompanied by a shamrock on the big green storefront, lend the feeling that some manner of enchantment resides inside, where a lonely man imagines meeting the love of his life in the frozen foods while the blase employees and customers around him explode with exuberance. The joy and whimsy of the song are magnified forever after once you’ve seen the music video; it’s hard to get those images out of your mind, and every time I’m in a grocery store, I hope that this song will come on the radio so I can see a real-life reenactment.

Buble has a distinctive voice that’s a throwback to 1940s crooners like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. He’s one of just a handful of contemporary artists whose voice I can instantly identify in a song I’ve never heard before. Of course, it feels a little funny to call him “contemporary” when the very thing that makes him stand out is his old-fashioned sound. In any case, though, most of his music has a refreshing innocence to it, and that’s certainly the case here. It’s a song of relentless optimism.

The speaker is a man who has been through his share of heartaches, but he’s determined not to let it get him down for long. He’s convinced that his soulmate is out there somewhere, and one of these days when he least suspects it, when he’s doing some mundane task (like grocery shopping), she will appear. “I might have to wait; I’ll never give up. I guess it’s half timing, and the other half’s luck. Wherever you are, whenever it’s right, you’ll come out of nowhere and into my life.” He won’t necessarily recognize her instantly – an idea alluded to more overtly in the video – but he has no doubt that their paths will cross and she will bring out the very best in him. This is his pre-emptive love song to her.

Buble wrote the song with Alan Chang and Amy Foster-Gillis, who previously collaborated with him on the hits Home and Everything. If you jot the lyrics down on the page and look at them there, they’re not really all that impressive. Most of the rhymes are imprecise, and one line includes the word “work” three times. But boy, when he sings them, they just pop. The upbeat music has a lot to do with that. The piano drives the melody, but other instruments join in, and by the end, it feels like you’re standing in the middle of a Main Street parade. Part of the fun of the song is pointing out the Beatles references, including the big brass band and the repetition of the words “love, love, love” toward the end.

Every time I hear the song, I can’t help grinning and singing along. While it’s specifically about being patient and waiting for love to take you by surprise, it can more generally be taken as an ode to the possibility of remarkable things happening even amidst the most run-of-the-mill circumstances. It reminds me of Dr. Seuss’s first book, And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street; this guy’s imagination is running away with him, but the fact remains that he might just see something out of the ordinary today. It’s the kind of song that makes you eager to go out your front door and face the world. Maybe most of all, it makes me think of friends I treasure but haven’t met yet; whenever I hear this song, it gives me hope that it will happen one of these days, and there will be much rejoicing.

The single for Haven’t Met You Yet comes paired with Buble’s live cover of the old standard Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which is similarly peppy, though I won’t say it’s my favorite version of the song. I think Buble tries a little too hard to put his own stamp on it, which results in some rather skewed enunciation. It does complement the main song well, but it’s more of an afterthought. Still, together, they convey the impression that life and love alike are crazy and unpredictable, and that can be a very good thing.