“You just try to pick the songs that are most meaningful to you,” says five time Grammy-winner Michael McDonald about the inspiration for his new album, Soul Speak. “These songs span my life—they’re the ones where I can remember where I was when I first heard them, the ones that made me interested in becoming a recording artist, the songs I’d always imagined myself singing.”

Soul Speak is the natural follow-up to McDonald’s two smash explorations of the Motown Records songbook—the platinum-selling Motown from 2003, which was nominated for two Grammy awards, and the next year’s gold-selling Motown Two. But this time, McDonald didn’t restrict himself to any one style or record label or decade; he wanted to interpret songs that he loved, regardless of genre. So while some of the selections—“For Once in My Life,” “Walk on By,” or the album’s first single, “Love TKO”—fall squarely within the blue-eyed soul territory that we associate with Michael McDonald, others, like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” are a bit more surprising.

The creator of such hits as “I Keep Forgettin’," the Grammy-winning “Yah Mo B There," and the Number One pop single “On My Own," McDonald isn’t afraid to challenge expectations.. “Everybody always wants you to keep doing what you did last time,” he says. “You’re always met with, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that, you’ll lose your fan base.’ But I’ve found that whenever I got back on the radio, it was with something completely different than what I’d done before.”