Inspired by this thread
Bands with technically poor lead singers dominate my music collection. For many of them, if you replaced the strangled-cat vocalist with someone who could carry a tune you’d probably hear better songs. But for some, you emphatically would not.
A good example is New Order. Bernard Sumner has *the *most atonal, flat voice but I find it to be really moving. There is something plaintive and vulnerable about his singing that gives the electronic music an emotional dimension. He doesn’t try to hide his weaknesses as a singer by shouting, which take balls. If the nascent New Order had replaced Ian Curtis with a tunesmith, the results would have been nowhere near as good IMO.
Who else can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but is indispensable to the quality of the band’s music?
Three of my all-time favorite singers have pretty horrible voices by traditional standards. Too much drinking, smoking, and screaming made them unable to carry a pretty tune, but nobody is better than them at what they do:
Tom Waits (my all-time favorite artist)
Shane MacGowan (of the Pogues)
Mike Ness (of Social Distortion) - I just saw them live last week, for the first time! SO AWESOME!
I don’t know if I’d say that Darren Hayman of Hefner has an awful voice, but I think it is quite squawky and it took a bit of getting used to. Having said that, it came to strike me as part of their charm.
Mark Knopfler might as well be Placido Domingo compared to, say, Axl Rose.
Axl gets my vote. Guns N’ Roses wrote quite a few great songs. Axl has a terrible, horrible voice. Yet it’s hard for me to picture anyone with a good voice singing those songs. What a conundrum.
I heard Neil Young say in an interview that he became a singer not because he was the best singer in the band, but, “we were all bad, but I was the least bad.”
Joe Walsh’s voice, on a good day, sounds like a bad oboe, but I like him anyway.
I’m a huge Grateful Dead fan, but it would be a stretch to call Jerry Garcia even a fair singer.
On the American Routes radio show, I heard an interview with Tom Waits. His natural speaking voice is nothing like the whiskied croak you hear on stage. They played a clip of him singing in his natural singing voice, and that was quite a shock.
I should clarify that I emphatically do not love Mick Jagger’s voice, but he’s got to be the person in the biz to have made the most money with such an awful voice. I cringe every time I hear him sing, though.
His voice seems smooth and refined compared to most of the nominees here. I second Mr. Smashing Pumpkin Man, by the way. Lov’em, but my voice-slut friend can’t even stand to listen through a whole song.