Paul Anka New Album 2026: Singer Admits He Regrets Not Spending Enough Time With His Five Older Girls

The framed gold records are the first thing you see in Paul Anka's Los Angeles home. Then the photographs: Sinatra, Presley, a teenage Anka with that open, slightly startled look of someone who has no idea the next 70 years of his life will be spent on stage. But if you follow the noise on a weekday evening in 2026, you don't end up in a studio or a writing room. You find the 84‑year‑old songwriter at the poker table, surrounded by his 20‑year‑old son Ethan and a pack of friends, eavesdropping on their world.

Anka has been famous for so long that his career feels like part of pop's furniture. What's more revealing, speaking to PEOPLE ahead of his new album Inspirations of Life and Love, is how bluntly he talks about the years he didn't get right — and the very deliberate way he is trying to parent differently the second time round.

'He's my buddy. We're so close. You hear that it keeps you younger — it does,' he says of Ethan. 'And I love it.'

Paul Anka New Album 2026, And A Different Kind Of Second Act

The Paul Anka new album 2026, Inspirations of Life and Love, sounds like the sort of title a veteran might slap on a victory‑lap compilation. It is not. It arrives alongside a tour starting in March, long days on the road and a household organised around a young man rather than a nostalgia circuit.

Anka won full custody of Ethan in 2017, after a bruising legal battle with ex‑wife Anna Åberg. By then, he was hardly a novice parent. With his late ex‑wife Anne de Zogheb he had already raised five daughters: Alexandra, now 59, Amanda, 57, Alicia, 55, Anthea, 54, and Amelia, 48. That first family grew up in the white‑hot era of his career, when a working day could mean studio sessions, television tapings, late‑night casino shows and planes at dawn.

Looking back, he doesn't sugarcoat the imbalance.

'We do a lot of things together,' he says of life with Ethan. 'I like the fact, unfortunately and fortunately, that I can put all that time into him that I couldn't with my girls. I look at it as, I did the best I could. But with him now, I see the other side.'

It's an unvarnished admission most famous fathers avoid making on the record. You can hear both the regret and the relief in that 'unfortunately and fortunately' — the knowledge that the daughters got the distracted, juggling version of him, and Ethan gets the one who can actually show up for the weekday stuff.

The singer is at pains not to turn that into overcompensation. He describes himself as 'very liberal in the sense that they figure it out and they have the capability of figuring it out', and talks about offering guidance 'without hovering'. That's the theory, at least. In practice, he beams recounting the very ordinary rituals: poker nights with Ethan's friends, leaning back and letting their conversations wash over him.

'It totally keeps me young. I love it, because I get all the information. I take them on the road with me,' he says, sounding almost giddier about stolen gossip from 20‑year‑olds than about yet another sold‑out theatre.

For Ethan, that means a version of childhood his older sisters never had: tour buses, backstage corridors, a father who is present and — crucially — not afraid to be "just Dad" even when fans are queuing for selfies outside.

Regrets, Fatherhood And The Paul Anka New Album 2026

The Paul Anka new album 2026 sits in a wider pattern for the Canadian‑American star. In the past few years he has been disarmingly open about the shape of his life: why he has no intention of retiring, why he is single by choice, why another marriage isn't on the cards. The running theme is a man who has made peace with his own contradictions and is no longer particularly interested in pretending otherwise.

'I don't live my age. I never have,' he says. 'Age doesn't matter. I think the fact that I'm doing it is what's keeping me healthy. If you stand still, they'll throw dirt on you. You have to keep doing it.'

It is a very Anka line — part old‑school showbiz bravado, part quietly serious. This is, after all, the man who co‑wrote My Way, an anthem for men who want to declare that their choices, however messy, were somehow all part of the plan. What makes his current phase different is that he is willing to say, out loud, that he would do some things another way if he could.

He doesn't put it in tortured, therapeutic language. He just says he can now 'see the other side' of fatherhood: what it is to have time for the small stuff. There is something bracing about that honesty from a performer whose generation was trained never to show doubt.

It is tempting to cast Ethan as a late‑in‑life corrective, the child who finally gets the best of Paul Anka. That is too neat, and Anka himself refuses the implication that he failed his daughters. 'I did the best I could,' he repeats, and if the phrase sounds a little like someone trying to convince himself as well as the interviewer, it is also probably true. Pop history is littered with fathers who didn't even try.

What is undeniable is that the bond with his son has become the emotional centre of this late career. The tours, the new record, the refusal to retire — all of it is now entangled with the fact that there is a 20‑year‑old watching, absorbing, deciding what kind of man he wants to be.

If Anka wants his career to feel 'inspirational', as he puts it, that audience of one may matter more than the thousands out front.

You can sense it in the way he talks about being a single father almost as another creative job: drawing on 'a lot of things' he has seen, trying to pass on what wisdom he can, stepping back just enough to let Ethan make his own mistakes. It is not glamorous. It is, in its own way, much harder than walking on stage.

The irony is that after seven decades of performing, what may linger longest about Paul Anka is not just the songs, but the image of an octogenarian icon at a kitchen table full of twenty‑somethings, laughing over a poker hand and listening — really listening — to what they have to say.