A lot of subjects blend into the same thing: intolerance. When you're a little kid, you don't know that it's going to get better. Your life experience hasn't told you that. I want to protect those people. I want to send out a message and at least try to get that across.

I was so lucky. I had a dad and a mom that loved me and my sisters so much. My Uncle Mike and Uncle Frank were married. They must be together for fortysomething years now. Long story short, there was never any stigma attached to that. At the youngest age, I remember my dad saying, "Sometimes men love men and women love women. It's nature.

[Dean Martin ] had this really wonderful rich, authentic, distinct vocal style. His humour in movies [and] the self-deprecation and the coolness he had could overshadow what a marvellous vocalist in the Great American Songbook he is.

It's human nature and one day maybe 20 years from now some young kid will come up and people will tell him "my God, you are like a young Michael Bublé. It happened to Harry Connick Jr with the Sinatra thing and now people are saying to me that I am the new Harry Connick Jr. It is a natural thing. I remember hearing interviews with Harry Connick saying "I am not Sinatra, leave me alone, I am different". It's a small thing to deal with.

When I say something funny in a newspaper and I meant it to be funny, it doesn't read that way.

For me I look at a group like Queen or AC/DC or the Beastie Boys. There was melody within what they did. There was a certain style with what they did. I think it is coming back.

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.