Higher

Michael Bublé gets lots of praise for his jazzy, nostalgic cover songs, but he’s just as much of a hitmaker in his own right. Here, on his first studio album in three years, the Canadian crooner flexes both muscles, reinterpreting classics made popular by Bob Dylan (“Make You Feel My Love”), Barry White (“You’re My First, My Last, My Everything”) and Paul McCartney (“My Valentine”, which was produced by Sir Paul himself), while also delivering a clutch of fresh original material. The slow-burning ballad “Mother” honours the strong women around him (“Another word for saviour/And another word for saint,” he sings) and the impassioned “I’ll Never Not Love You” is classic Bublé romanticism. But there’s something large and life-affirming about these songs that reaches beyond first-dance fare—they’re pure, light-hearted, unapologetically joyful. Perhaps that is partly because Bublé's now eight-year-old son Noah is five years into remission from liver cancer, which is the sort of thing that makes every tiny moment feel heaven-sent. Proof: The album’s title track was inspired by something Noah casually improvised one night during bath time (“When you go low, I go high…”). A fleeting, run-of-the-mill moment but for Bublé, it stuck. A few weeks later, he sang it to Ryan Tedder while the pair were writing in the studio. Noah is credited as co-writer on the final track.