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.

I had this strange belief, perhaps naively, that somehow, if I kept working hard, and I kept doing it with integrity, that I would get my chance.

I met the [Frank] Sinatra family for a [performance] I did for his hundredth birthday and one of the first things Sinatra's daughters said to me was, "I'm so glad you make your own beautiful arrangements now."

You want to be commercially successful and critically acclaimed. But the truth is, there's only a few Bruce Springsteens and Paul McCartneys out there.

[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.

There was no way I was ever going to get a fair shake. How good could I be? I was Canadian. I wasn't from New York. I wasn't from Vegas. I was born in 1975, not 1917. My last name wasn't Sinatra or Darin or Martin. Early on and often, there was always the comparison. "He's good, but he's no '[fill in the] blank.'

I'm fascinated by politics. I love watching everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Lawrence Krauss to people like Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky on YouTube.