CANADIAN crooner Michael Bublé will close his six-date British tour next year with a Yorkshire concert at Leeds First Direct Arena on June 3, in support of his new album, Love.

Tickets to see the 60 million-selling retro singer will go on sale on November 23 at 9am at aegpresents.co.uk, preceded by the release of his eighth studio album on Friday.

In the week that his last album, 2016’s Nobody But Me, was launched, Bublé and his family went through an emotional journey that informed and changed his life. He was unsure how or if music would remain part of his life. “What the experience did was give me a real perspective," he says of his young son Noah being diagnosed with liver cancer. "It completely changed my outlook on what mattered and what was important to me."

The desire to express himself creatively slowly came back into focus, however, when Bublé invited his band mates over to his house, not with the intention of making music, but simply to enjoy each other’s company and drink, eat pizza and play video games.

"Once we got bored with that, we started jamming and there was this wonderful click, this moment where I went, ‘Oh, yeah! I forgot how much I loved this’," Bublé recalls. "I think I just needed a little helpful reminder."

The concept for the new album soon flowed. "Then, the only question was not 'Am I going back to work?'. It was 'Can I do it on my terms? Can I do the songs I love with the people I love the way that I love and do it with pure joy and bliss?'. And once I knew that was possible, it was a go."

Bublé’s vision entailed looking at love in all its facets, both sacred and profane. "This would be my group of short stories that would be my theory of love," he says. "The good, the bad, the light, the dark, and I think that took a lot of pressure off [Bublé’s co-producers] David Foster and Jochem van der Saag and me. There was just great ease of having done our homework and knowing what the record was."

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"Oh, yeah! I forgot how much I loved this," says Michael Bublé. Picture: Evaan Kheraj

His mission became clearer as he picked the songs, or, as he says, "I think the songs chose me. It’s strange how the universe will just drop things into your lap."

Bublé anchors Love with songs from The Great American Songbook, often reinventing timeless classics with new arrangements, such as My Funny Valentine, teaming up with Cécile McLorin Salvant for a bilingual duet of La Vie En Rose, and putting a new twist on Kris Kristofferson’s Help Me Make It Through The Night with Loren Allred.

Charlie Puth contributes backing vocals on Love You Anymore, a song he co-wrote with frequent Bublé collaborator Johan Carlsson, while the album's emotional centrepiece, Forever Love, was co-written by Bublé about his favourite role, being a dad, and the vulnerability and strength that comes with unconditional love.

Love stands as a testament to the power of music and its healing power, for the listener and 43-year-old Bublé alike. "The truth is I needed to make this album," he says. "The truth is it was really therapeutic for me. I felt so comfortable. I mean, these songs, this genre, is the essence of me. It's where I live, it's where I've grown up. It fits me perfectly. It's so natural."

The unyielding outpouring of support from his fans lifted Bublé and his family through their darkest times. "Going through what my family went through also gave me faith in people and humanity," he says. "I just felt really blessed in a lot of different ways, obviously with the outcome with my boy and I also felt like I had been blessed with this wonderful opportunity in my life to do something that I love that could maybe have the positive impact out in the world that the world had on us."

Recording Love brought Bublé a sense of joy that, in hindsight, he realised he had been missing on recent projects. "I never felt so free [since] I started my career when I was never worried about the results because I was so overjoyed and grateful that I could be doing it at that capacity," he reflects. "I just might have forgotten that joy. I don't know if I remembered well enough the real reason of why I loved it. I wish that I didn't need something so harsh to teach me such a lesson, but it is what it is."

And now, as Bublé's Love goes out into the world tomorrow, he hopes the music reaches those who might need to hear it the most and provide comfort to those in distress. "There are people that are gonna hear these songs and they're gonna be inspired to fall in love and there are people who are gonna hear these songs and they're gonna be hurting," he says. "They're gonna be, in many ways, going through tough stuff. And if one of these songs lifts them out of that, if it can carry them to another day, I think then I'm doing my job and I think I'm being responsible for the gifts I've been given."