Before departing for your desert island, you’re allowed to choose ONE of the variety of rock voices typified by each of the following singers. Once settled on the island, all recordings featuring that singer will be sung in the one style you have chosen. You won’t lose any songs in each artist’s catalog, just any voice in which they sang that song other than the one style you have chosen. Got me? Now, choose wisely!
Mick Jagger: Typical Jagger (eg, “Satisfaction” or “Rock Off”) style that all garage singers would attempt to mimic or “blackface” style employed on occasion in late-60s and early-70s.
Debbie Harry: “Tough chick” style of “One Way or Another” or high-pitched, dreamy style of “Heart of Glass” and “Dreaming”?
Roger Daltry: Coolly menacing Mod style of “Can’t Explain” or the bare-chested, anthemic, shouting style perfected at Woodstock and throughout Who’s Next?
Paul McCartney: Little Richard-derived rock belt; high-energy melodicism of “Magical Mystery Tour” and the rocking parts of the best Wings songs; or jaunty showman’s voice of “When I’m Sixty-Four”?
David Bowie: Slyly rockin’ voice of earlier rockers like “Queen Bitch” and “Rebel Rebel” or the Anthony Newly-inspired voice of “Heroes” and various ballads?
Following your choices, please feel free to add your own split-personality vocalists for us to consider.
Tough call, but I’d have to go with Macca’s Little Richard-derived rock belt. If I’m on that island I’ll definitely be rockin’ hard, so no mellow, laid back Gilligan stuff for me.
I think I’d want the talk-singing Jagger of the 70s. For Debbie Harry, I guess it would be the Heart of Glass voice. Definitely anthemic Daltrey, which I could also use to scare off smoke monsters and headhunting tribes.
McCartney’s a tough one, but as with Jagger, I’m going off on my own and taking piano-playing deeper voiced McCartney, the voice he used for things like the “outta college money spent” section of You Never Give Me Your Money.
Bowie…definitely the Hunky Dory to Ziggy era voice, though he uses a few in that era alone.
How about Prince? Anybody want to try to catalog his various voices? I’d say he rivals McCartney and Bowie for largest vocal disguise kit.