What Makes a Great Singer?

There's something about a voice that's personal, not unlike the particular odor or shape of a given human body. Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession, a soul-burp you really can't keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world. How helplessly candid! How appalling!

Contrary to anything you've heard, the ability to actually carry a tune is in no regard a disability in becoming a rock & roll singer, only a mild disadvantage. Conversely, nothing in the vocal limitations of a Lou Reed guarantees a "Pale Blue Eyes" every time out, any more than singing as crazy-clumsy as Tom Waits guarantees a "Downtown Train." Yet there's a certain time-tested sturdiness to the low-chops approach forged by touchstone figures like Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and Jonathan Richman, one that helps define rock & roll singing.

For me, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, just to mention two, are superb singers by any measure I could ever care about — expressivity, surprise, soul, grain, interpretive wit, angle of vision. Those two folks, a handful of others: their soul-burps are, for me, the soul-burps of the gods. The beauty of the singer's voice touches us in a place that's as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire, another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we've recovered our senses. It's as if they've fooled us into loving them, diddled our hard-wiring, located a vulnerability we thought we'd long ago armored over. Falling in love with a singer is like being a teenager every time it happens.

Singers are tricksters. Sometimes we'll wonder if they're more like movie actors than musicians per se — we'll decide that the "real" R.E.M. are embodied by Buck, Berry and Mills, not that kooky frontman Stipe, or the "real" Rolling Stones are Richards-Wood-Watts-Wyman, rather than that irritating capitalist Jagger. But beware — go down this route and soon you'll find yourself wondering how the Doors sound sans "Mr. Mojo Risin' " or imagining someone can better put across Dylan's gnarled syllables than Dylan himself. Firm evidence is on the table against both those lines of inquiry. In truth, so often what makes a band like the Stones or R.E.M. (or the band Dylan transformed from the Hawks into the Band) so truly unique and powerful is in how the instrumentalists rise to the challenge of creating a home for the vocalist's less-than-purely-musical approach to a song: the braggadocio or mumbling, the spoken asides or too many syllables crowded into a line that destroy traditional rhythm or measure, those movie-star flourishes that compel us to adore and resent the singer at once.

The funny thing about this kind of imposter anxiety is that it infects singers themselves, to the extent that certain well-known vocalists have been known to decorate themselves onstage with a carefully unplugged guitar (I know of a couple, but I'm not telling). And it certainly explains the "rockist" bias in favor of singers who are also the writers of the songs they sing. If a vocal performance that tenderizes our hearts is a kind of high-wire walk, an act breathtaking and preposterous at once, we can reassure ourselves that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer have at least dug the foundations for the poles and strung the wire themselves. Singers reliant on existing or made-to-fit material, like Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart, Whitney Houston — or, for that matter, a band's pure vocal instrument, like Roger Daltrey — might just be birds alighting on someone else's wire. Listening to singers who are like magnificent animals wandering through a karaoke machine, we may derive a certain thrill from wondering if they find the same meaning in the lyrics they're putting across that the lyrics' writer intended, or any meaning at all — as opposed to dwelling in a realm of pure sound-as-emotion.