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MOJO
Whose voice changed the most?
Let us answer your rock’n’roll questions and solve your musical mysteries.
Getty (2), Alamy
Going deep: (clockwise from above left) Leonard Cohen went gravelly in the early ’80s; was Britney Spears rude on If U Seek Amy?; Crack Cloud’s wacky sample on Tough Baby; Barney Bubbles liked it out there.
I was listening to Alex Chilton and it occurred to me how different his singing voice was with The Box Tops than it was with Big Star a few years later. What other singers re-invented their voices like this?
Geoff Donovan, via e-mail
MOJO says: Interesting question! With the caveat that vocal cords do change with age, health and the number of cigs smoked – see how Marianne Faithfull’s voice matured while retaining its essential Marianne-ness – there are some intriguing examples of drastic re-boots and suspicions that you’re actually listening to someone else. One great practitioner was Tim Buckley, who graduated from relatively normal folk rock singing to the much wilder vocalisations of Starsailor and beyond: similarly, David Sylvian on the early Japan LPs sounds much punkier than his later poised performances, while Ozzy Osbourne sounds lower and scarier on Black Sabbath’s debut than he does on Paranoid and after. And when fans compared Leonard Cohen’s Recent Songs (1979) and Various Positions (1984) they were struck by how gravelly and more inclined to the deeps he suddenly sounded, as fans of early Tom Waits would be when confronted with 2004’s Real Gone. Conversely, former 1960s heart-throb Scott Walker re-imagined his voice into tortuous higher registers from 1995 onwards. Another reversal of sorts happened when Phil Collins took over as Genesis’s vocalist on A Trick Of The Tail and was briefly considered a Peter Gabriel soundalike (check out Entangled, and he does a bit). Dylan, inevitably, has done it numerous times, from folk to country and rock to his current state of finalform American elder, and this life journey is also apparent in the moving contrast between Joni