I want to be around for a long time. I want this to be a career. I want to sing like Tony Bennett. I want to be an old man and I want to go through all the ups and downs and I wanna still love what I do.
I was three or four, and my mother would have a Bing Crosby record playing through the house. It was my introduction to jazz, harmonies, melodies, musicianship, and emotion.
I am a candid interview and I have a dark and dry sense of humor - a very Canadian sense of humor and I am only learning now stupidly that you can't read tongue. When I say something funny in a newspaper and I meant it to be funny, it doesn't read that way.
It turns out that I'm far too schizophrenic musically for people to categorize me. I think people judge me a lot before they ever really know who I am.
Look at Neil Diamond. Was he the cool guy? No, he was the housewives' guy. He didn't try to be what he wasn't. He just did what he did - made great music, was a good entertainer, nice-enough guy.
Not that I'm some rocker, but what I do in a show is probably far more aggressive than what Dean Martin or Bobby Darin ever did.
Other artists, they write 13 songs, and hopefully one or two of them are successful singles. And the other 11, for the most part, are filler.
I thought without a doubt I would be a fisherman.
When grandpa was ill and could've died, I would have swapped all my record sales so he could get well. He is the reason I am a singer. He was my best friend growing up.
I think I'm a mama's boy who wanted to be a hockey player, who failed, and had to become a singer. I think that I'm a generous, impatient, kind, jerk.
Record companies worrying more about market share than developing artists - I hear there was a time when if your first record didn't sell 8m copies, you were still given a chance to grow as a songwriter.
I get to study and I got to mimic and what I basically did was I stole from every person that I could steal from. I was an imitator. That's what I was. It was years before I could take all of these things that I loved about all of these different artists and put them together and find my voice.
This is why I wanted to be different and why I wanted to have power and fame and money: because I wanted to be attractive to the opposite sex. I'd be lying to you if I didn't say that was a big part of it.
The artist that had the biggest impact on me was Michael Jackson. He was my Elvis and Beatles. When I was 15, I listened to a lot of Sinatra, but my jean jacket didn't have, 'I love Frank' on it, it had, 'I love AC/DC', 'Guns N Roses', 'Pearl Jam'. I thought Eddie Vedder was the second coming.
I have the most eclectic audience - I've got gay, I've got straight, black, white, rich, poor, young, old, in 45 countries. And they don't all come because I'm the Sinatra kid, though that's a big part of it. My biggest successes have come from pop songs that I write myself.
The fame is the downside. I can't think of many positive things about it - except that when I go to parties, I don't have to stand there like a lemon.
Perspective has allowed me to rekindle my love of music.
I always felt it was weird, that retro thing where guys showed up in zoot suits and tried to talk as if they were from some other time.
A lot changed the moment I had kids; I had no idea of the perspective it would give me. It made making the right decisions a lot easier.
I have a tendency to sabotage relationships; I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good-for-nothing thoughts.
