Former "Dirty Jobs" host Mike Rowe does still flex his musical muscles now and then, but just for the love of it. It's not a job or anything.

Indeed, he was never looking for a career in opera. The truth is, he says, he was in it for the girls.

"I joined the opera to get my union card and meet girls," he told the "Tampa Bay Times." "I figured I'd do one show and quit. But the girls were everywhere, and the truth is, the music was really decent."

His musical training doesn't stop at opera -- again, that was a practical decision on his part (the union card got him into show business). He started in his high school choir, and then fell in love with barbershop -- he formed a quartet called Semi-Fourmal ("because there were four of us and we were terribly clever," he said in an interview on the Barbershop Harmony Society's official website).

It is this kind of singing he still likes to dabble in. He talks in the interview about winning an impromptu competition in 2007 among his old singing-group colleagues in his native Baltimore.

His vocal training has clearly served him well. Apart from his long run on Discovery's "Dirty Jobs," (which was canceled last year after eight seasons and hundreds of messy career profiles) most of Rowe's work has been as a narrator. His most recent gig is doing voiceovers on "Airplane Repo," also on Discovery.

He also keeps himself busy running mikeroweWORKS, a foundation dedicated to promoting work in the trades.

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