I have never held back preaching my love for this woman's angelically breathy voice. Every one of her songs on every one of her albums is at their worst fantastic. She played her best record Life For Rent in its entirety when me and my death metal band mate saw her live. He also went down in history as the only guy to ever attend a Dido concert in a Suffocation t-shirt, I would still presume. Dido Armstrong could sing anything and it would be amazing.
"Heavy metal Elvis", Glenn Danzig's killer vocals have pretty much remained unchanged since the Misfits days until now. He is just as impressive live, throwing kung-fu kicks and punches all over the place as he wails about women, his dick, and Satan. The first four Danzig albums are pure awesome, his brand of dark blues fitting his voice like an evil glove.
Great punk singers are few and far between. In many ways, that is kind of the point. Joey Ramone trumps them all though I would say. Another one of a kind voice, I just love the way this guy sings. Some people were born for greatness I guess and with a mug like his, Joey was simply meant to be the greatest punk vocalist of all time.
Harry Nilsson is one of the most well-respected pop singers in history and rightfully so. A gorgeously soaring voice that could and often did sing any style at any time. Nilsson notoriously blew his naturally beautiful instrument out during the making of the Pussy Cats album, (during a alcohol-fueled screaming match with the album's producer, one John Lennon). Sadly, his pipes never quite recovered and his further descent into drugs got the better of him, but man, some amazing stuff was left behind.
I would probably go as far as to put Collective Soul in my top twenty bands of all time, as every album they have ever done is fantastic. Mainman Ed Roland has written countless songs which I would rank as pop masterpieces. Roland's ability to compose great melodies has never left him and most hopefully never will. For my money, he has the most effortlessly beautiful southern yowl in all of rock music.
I cannot say that I am a fan of that latest at this writing Opeth opus Heritage, but I certainly cannot say that I am disappointed that Mikael Akerfeldt has seemingly given up his death metal vocals to focus exclusivity on his "clean" singing either. Damnation was so goddamn good that I even said then that I would not mind if they kept making that same album over and over again for the rest of their days. Akerfeldt's voice is outstanding and not at all just for a metal singer. Haunting and warm, it is the kind of voice that you can cozy up to a fire with.
I seem to have several chaps on this list who are much more well known and respected as guitar players than singers. Enter David Gilmour to that equation. His voice was so good that even after Roger Waters bowed out of Pink Floyd, the band remained listenable almost solely in my opinion on that fact that Gilmour got to sing way more. I am rather ignorant to his solo work, oddly, but his voice has always stood out quite beautifully.
I really should have more country singers represented here. Blame it on ignorance yet again. The Dixie Chicks have remained really the only contemporary pop country band that I have ever listened to and it is incredibly easy to hear how Natalie Maines got the gig in the first place. She has all of the chops in the world, becoming as soft or rowdy as the material calls for. In any capacity, Maines never sounds less than outstanding.
I had to put two singers from Uriah Heep on here, one of my favorite bands ever. Post-Ken Hensley Heep albums are actually something I have only recently been accumulating. So for many years, I simply had no idea how truly good Heep's longest-serving frontman Bernie Shaw really is. Especially after seeing him live twice so far, impressed I truly was. He does have a gun-holster for his mic after all. At almost sixty, he can still deliver anything from the band's massive catalog with incredible ease. Plus their new shit is as good, if not better, than the old stuff.
If you are a Darkness fan, then Justin Hawkins is one of your favorite singers. That just goes without saying. Whether you dig them or not, it is impossible to listen to this band without pulling a Ted Theodore Logan and simply going "whoa" at Hawkins' outrageous vocals. There has probably never been a rock vocalist that can consistently wail as high as this guy can. Even more than that for me though is that the Darkness has not even come close yet to penning a bad song. Hawkins' vocal melodies are easily the best thing in any of those songs as well.
40. Elvis Presley
Number forty? Yeah yeah, I know. I do love Elvis Presley and always have. "How can
you not?" is the natural thing to say. I guess I just love thirty-nine people
better. Anyway, what new can I say about the most famous
voice in the history of rock and roll? Nothing really. The King is the
King for a damn good reason. Whether he "invented" the genre or
"stole" it from black people is irrelevant. His importance is
incalculable and his voice was simply flawless. Also for the record, I
for one think that the fatter he got, the more awesome he got.
I miss the Lilith Fair, which is a pity in that I never got a chance to go. Do not think that I have not constructed the perfect current line-up for such an event in my free time, BTW. In any event, Sarah McLachlan is greatness. Surfacing is as fine a singer songwriter record as has ever been made and she sings her ass off on it. The, (many), ballads especially showcase this, from "I Love You", to "Do What You Have To Do", to "Angel", to name but a handful.
I seemed to have clumped the majority of females on this list together, which is odd how that worked out. Portishead's Beth Gibbons stood out immediately to me the first time I ever heard Dummy. Floaty and haunting while possessing some insane vibrato, it in fact took several listens before I really started to pay attention to anything else besides her voice on it. At this writing I still only have Dummy in my CD arsenal, having always meant to bump up my Portishead collection. I and everyone else should really own everything she has ever sung on.
Fuck Liam Gallagher. Oasis very oddly has the distinction of not only having one of the best vocalists ever in Noel, but also one of the worst in Liam. Why the fuck that guy was allowed to sing in the first place is beyond me. I mean, Noel Gallagher wrote everything in the early days and almost everything by the time they packed it in. Liam just looked like he always loathed being there and obnoxiously whined his way through his brother's phenomenal songs. Anyway, this is supposed to be about how awesome Noel is, not how shitty and useless his sibling is. So yeah, Noel's voice is awesome.
The first three Bjork albums are all the wonderful, so I can then only imagine that the rest of them also are. Bjork is certainly bizarre people, but brilliance has come out of many an odd ball where music is concerned. Bjork uses her incomparable voice to excellent effect, producing some amazing sounds with her seemingly limitless range. It just so helps that her music in itself is fantastic as well.
"Gonna Get Over You" was the first Sara Bareilles anything I had ever heard and yeah, I was in right away. She has got one of those technically proficient voices that can sing any range, any volume, any key, etc. Dynamically flawless then with vocal melodies that are wholly spectacular to boot.
A fellow musician and metalhead I knew once put it best when he said, "Bruce Dickinson doesn't have the greatest voice in the world, but he knows how to use it better than anyone". Dickinson has sung in front of hundreds of thousands of Maiden fans screaming every lyric right along with him, and he is as flawless now in his mid-fifties as he was in the 1980s. Like Rob Halford, it is impossible to listen to many a Bruce Dickinson performance without pumping one's fist. The man is a living legend.
When all is said and done, my favorite female vocalist and songwriter is probably PJ Harvey. Though I was not really a fan of her latest Let England Shake, it actually only further proved how amazing her voice is as she deliberately and completely changed her vocal style to fit said album. Elsewhere in her outstanding discography, she is just as impressive, utilizing a low, creepy croon or a powerful falsetto with equal ease, usually within the same song.
Many
a great bluesman has blown us away with their vocal delivery over the
decades, (Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, etc). Muddy Waters
is nearly chief among them though. His Newport Jazz rendition of "Got
My Mojo Working" is really what every singer on earth should measure as
the ultimate live vocal performance. Of course "Mannish Boy", arguably
the greatest song in the anything of history, is even more ridiculously
good. Quite simply, when Muddy Waters opens his mouth, he
commands the loins of the women.
The only man to have ever come even close to being an adequate replacement for Freddie Mercury, George Michael has a unique distinction indeed. His rendition of "Somebody To Love" at Concert For Life was so fucking good that I would bet top dollar that if Michael's solo career was not in such fine swing at that point in history, Queen simply would have had a new frontman and carried on as if nothing had ever happened. As it stands, Wham!, Faith, "Freedom"; they are all owned by Michael's killer voice.
The blue-eyed soul continues with that red-headed devil Mick Hucknall, naturally, from Simply Red fame. This guy may be one of the creepiest looking frontmen on this list, (or ever), but there is no denying that the guy's pipes are something else. Stars is a fantastic album and solely full of Hucknall penned originals, but he has proven himself more than capable of handling any number of R&B standards as good, if not better, than their original vocalists.
The "openly black", as George Carlin has said, Godfather of Soul Mr. Dynamite Hardest Working Man In Show Business James Brown, (his birth name I believe), belongs on every greatest singer/frontman/musician/sexual tyrannosaurus list you can make. I never got to see the man live which is one of life's great regrets, but goddamm, just watch ANY footage or listen to any recording from the Mighty James Brown and try not to be impressed. The man commanded respect and funk has never had a finer or funkier screamer than he.
Talk about singers who grew into their voices. In the wee early days, Bono sounded pretty much like any nameless 80s pop frontman, not that that was all bad mind you. By the time U2 unleashed their finest hour The Joshua Tree, Bono had arguably the best full-on vocal delivery in all of music. From there , he just kept getting better. By Achtung Baby his falsetto had fully matured and shit, there is not anything he cannot belt with the most profound emotion nowadays. He may "be the record", but the dude still owns.
Certainly on the list of "gone way too soon", Otis Redding only had a handful of records out when he just missed the 27 Club in 1967, dying at the age of twenty-six. As everyone knows, Redding was just getting started too. His Monterey Pop performance was the only such one to rival that of Jimi Hendrix' star making moment there as well. Live, this guy was a beast. Nobody fucking sang like that and nobody really has since. There is a raw, barely contained sexual force spewing out of every word that Redding sang, every sound he made. Greater things still would have followed, that seems certain.
Another who is no longer with us, Peter Steele's death in 2010 due to an aortic aneurysm came absolutely out of nowhere. Steele was not even fifty years old and a new Type O album was soon to be composed by the man. Thankfully, he left us with much greatness. Type O's final album Dead Again was damn near their best. Steele's vampiric moan was able to hit the lowest pitch imaginable, yet he could also croon away and scream his Conan-esque muscles off all within the same song. Such vocal prowess was completely unparalleled.
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