All these years later, Michael Bublé is still selling records.

Dining out in my area often takes me to Bertucci's, an Italian-cuisine franchise.
The overhead music speakers are always playing singers
with a certain repertoire, the American Songbook standards
that are easy on the ear
and far more difficult to execute than they sound.

That means that Michael Bublé's voice is regularly heard
along with Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra,
Ella Fitzgerald with or without Louis Armstrong
(I think their duets are simply grand),
Rosemary Clooney ... a few voices I don't recognize,
but always recognizable repertoire.

So unless I switch restaurants -- and I really love
a Bertucci's baby arugula salad with grilled chicken --
I have to listen to Michael Bublé whether I want to or not.

It is interesting for me to make a specific comparison:
Michael Bublé and Perry Como.   
Both have voices and repertoire that go down well
with a large group of consumers;
the repertoire is largely if not entirely the same;
both have been wildly successful in the material sense;
and both have got people who sneer at them.

It sets my teeth on edge when people sneer at Perry Como.
You have heard the taunts: he sounds like he is singing in his sleep.
That's the one that drives me nuts.
Actually Perry Como combines two different approaches.

One approach concerns diction, and delivery of a lyric.
This approach absolutely requires a sense of closeness and intimacy,
because the diction is very quiet and subtle.
It is not the declamatory diction of a Wagnerian heldentenor.
Rather, it is one of the hallmarks of the "crooner" genre:
as they used to say of Frank Sinatra,
"he knows how to get in bed with a popular song".
So the consonants are not projected as in the theater, with considerable force;
the consonants are carefully amplified by a microphone
as if the singer were murmuring endearments right into the audience's ear.
Bing Crosby was highly practiced at doing this, although
it took him a while to get it right;
Crosby ultimately did it so well that Perry Como made a role model of him.

Perry Como's other role model was Enrico Caruso. Como used to say
that he listened to Crosby and Caruso and modelled his singing on theirs.
And there is the secret of Perry Como's own style and technique.
By Caruso's technique, I do not mean belting out La Donna è Mobile.
I mean that very physical, athletic approach to supporting the singing voice
with what the teachers like to call "a column of air."
I use the word athletic because, as with a physical sport,
a discipline is required, the sort of discipline and coordination
with which one is rarely born,
that has to be practiced, corrected, refined, and mastered over years of work.
Perry Como's singing combined those intimate, gentle diction manners
with an extremely robust core of vocal sound.
Never mind if his singing puts some people to sleep
because they don't hear him being as expressive as Sinatra.
To sing as Como sang --
listen to the conclusion of "Some Enchanted Evening" with its
rising notes and volume --
you have to work expletive-deleted hard for a long time
to make it sound that easy and available.

Michael Bublé does not have Como's vocal technique.
His technique is different, and what seems more paramount to Bublé
is that the core of his voice has a shiny, polished, clean quality
even under the scrutiny of microphones and amplification.

My background with classical-music singing
predisposes me in favor of Perry Como,
even though his repertoire included the god-awful lyrics and tunes
which were rejected by Sinatra and his rat pack.

I'm not happy with Michael Bublé's
smooth-and-blank-as-a-mirror soundscape of a voice,
but that is a matter of taste;
he too is making something challenging sound very easy
and it does not surprise me that others look up to him.

It is false to say that he has no talent.
His sound is annoying and irritating to me, though, that much is true.