Michael Bublé Promotes "To Be Loved" The Michael Bublé charm offensive hit the ground running this week. On Tuesday, the release date for his sixth studio album, "To Be Loved" (Reprise), Mr. Bublé put in a shift as guest co-host on "Today" and later taped an interview with "Nightline." On Wednesday he was booked heavily with radio spots plugging the album and its insistently perky lead single, "It's a Beautiful Day." And a little after rush hour on Thursday morning, he could be seen ducking into the Lincoln Center subway station, still in his tuxedo and makeup from a taping of "Live! With Kelly & Michael" nearby. Backed by Naturally 7, the a cappella group that has opened for him on tour, Mr. Bublé gave an impromptu performance of "Who's Lovin" You," the Smokey Robinson song, to a small, delightedly startled crowd. "That is when you know you've made it," he said, indicating the subway platform, after belting his way through the tune. Then he spun around to greet his onlookers: almost all of them female, smartphones in hand. He isn't the type to show pressure, but Mr. Bublé, 37, faces a burden of expectation with "To Be Loved." It follows his blockbuster releases "Christmas," which was 2011"s best-selling album not made by Adele, and "Crazy Love," which made its debut at No. For an artist who has long been pitched, at least to his core demographic, as the likably hale young heir to Frank Sinatra - your daughter's boyfriend singing your father's tunes - that track record might seem as vulnerable as it is impressive. Mr. Bublé and his team certainly aren't taking any chances. "To Be Loved" reaffirms his suave command as a vocalist and song stylist, while subtly expanding the frame. After a long affiliation with the orchestral-pop producer David Foster, Mr. Bublé entrusted this album entirely to Bob Rock, whose other clients have included Bon Jovi and Metallica. Given that Mr. Rock also produced one of Mr. Bublé"s defining pop-crossover hits, "Haven't Met You Yet," this is not too wild a stretch. Among the album's four originals are "It's a Beautiful Day," blithely set on the other end of a speculative romance, and "After All," a sure-footed power-pop duet with Bryan Adams, who, like Mr. Bublé, is a proud son of Canada. There are a few solid nods to Motown, recorded direct to tape with the Dap-Kings, Brooklyn's purveyors of retro-soul. The title track, a hit for Jackie Wilson, also provided the title for the 1994 autobiography of Motown's founder, Berry Gordy. At the same time, "To Be Loved" is bookended by full-dress arrangements of "You Make Me Feel So Young" and "Young at Heart" - both inextricably linked to Sinatra, and to a specific brand of wistful optimism, one that values youth as a flexible commodity. As it happens, both songs were included as a tribute to Mr. Bublé"s grandfather, whose health was faltering at the time of the recording: he is the source of Mr. Bublé"s love of Dean Martin and the Mills Brothers, and an important early booster in his career. Still, the gesture has its strategic value, as do some of the album's other touches. Mr. Bublé"s duet partner on "Something Stupid," a No. 1 hit for Frank and Nancy Sinatra, is the actress Reese Witherspoon - a guarantee of coverage by the likes of "Us Weekly." As for a version of "Come Dance With Me," arranged as a cha-cha, it's surely no coincidence that Mr. Bublé is to perform it on Tuesday on "Dancing With the Stars." What's maybe a little surprising, amid all this calculation, is that "To Be Loved" also stands as Mr. Bublé"s most soulful album, and by and large his most satisfying. To hear him tell it, this was a hard-fought outcome: "With each record, I started to get more power, and with more power I started to become myself." During an hourlong conversation in the green room at "Live! With Kelly & Michael," where he'd returned after his subway incursion, Mr. Bublé readily tackled the subject of his image. He pronounced himself "easy pickings" for critics, especially in light of the soft-focus headshot on the cover of his self-titled 2003 debut. By dint of his background, Mr. Bublé is hardly a softie: he grew up in a family of salmon fishermen on the Pacific Coast of Canada, and spent his youth working on the boats and idolizing hockey players. He's now a part owner of a minor league team. In the moments before his appearance on "Live! With Kelly & Michael," he was in a dressing room happily eliciting knockout stories from Victor Ortiz, the welterweight boxer, who was also one of that morning's guests (for his turn on "Dancing With the Stars"). But it's a bright, easygoing charisma that serves Mr. Bublé best, which partly explains his heavy promotional agenda. Some of his strongest work, in terms of image, has been as a self-deprecating talk show guest, or the straight man in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch. Before his televised performance on Thursday morning, he engaged in effortless banter with the show's hosts, Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan, around the subject of his impending fatherhood: his wife, the Argentinean actress and model Luisana Lopilato, is due to have a boy on Aug. 21. She smiled demurely as he spoke, and later mouthed the lyrics as he sang another album cut, the Bee Gees" "To Love Somebody." On one intriguing original on the new album, "I Got It Easy," Mr. Bublé seems to hint at his own good fortune: "Now I'm not trying to brag about it," he sings in the bridge, though a willfully ungenerous reading of the song might suggest that he is. Later in the song he sings: "I roll over in bed/Got a beautiful woman beneath me/Every night." Mr. Bublé said, earnestly, that "I Got It Easy" was actually meant as a reflection on the grace of God. It had been a hard sell to his label, he added. "I tried to pick my spot, and go: "You know what? I feel like I've earned the right to have this song on the album. And, O.K., maybe not everybody's going to dig it. Which might not be a concern for some artists. But toward the end of the interview Mr. Bublé, proudly recounting his insistence on old-fashioned recording techniques, wondered aloud whether "To Be Loved" had the highest production costs of any album released this year. He dialed his manager, Bruce Allen, who replied, on speaker, "It's well into the seven figures, but I'll tell you this: it's not over two million." For an instant the color drained from Mr. Bublé"s face. "O.K.," he said, "I thought it was less than that." He cursed, and laughed. Man, I'm not going to make any money! Hanging up the phone, he quickly recovered. "I think of myself as a grinder," he said, turning to the comfort of a hockey analogy. I'm not a first-line guy. I'm not the fastest or most talented. But I put my head down and just go about my business, and sometimes those are the guys that people love after 30 years. So, it's working. He laughed again, sharply. Unless I sell 10,000 records this week.