If he did it back in 2003, could he do it today ?
 

Hello there everyone !

I´m no vocal specialist here, so I´m curious about something: IMO, this is the greatest perfomance ever of Keep the Faith:


Here Jon produces some screams that takes us way back in time ... And this is 2003, the year which his voice went downhill ... We all know he´s got a lot better nowadays, so could he sing like that again ? I don´t know if he could do it every night, if it would cause too much damage on his vocals. Maybe he was so into it that night that he thought: "f**k it, just one time isn´t going to do any harm" ...

Any thoughts here ?

Regards

Eduardo

Aloha !

He sings very differently nowadays. His higher register is completely gone, he's just able to go higher with his lower register. The clear sound he used to have from 1986-2003 is completely gone, so no, he won't be able to pull it off. He still often sings "know...live...rain" instead of "you know you're gonna live through the rain" and I can't see it change anytime soon. He's able to hold the notes a lot longer than a few years ago, but if he has to do it very fast as in Keep The Faith he's lost, which is why the songs from the first 2 album sounded so horrible when they did those live this tour.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan

Thanks for the answer ! Just one last question, since I'm completely ignorant about this subject: What do you mean by lower and higher register ? Because even thought I noticed he's using some "tricks" to sing, during both LH and TC tours he hit some high notes that he wasn't able to hit during the 2003-2007 period.

Vocal registers refer to the use of the larynx when singing and in this case the range - basically he's losing the high notes. It happens to everyone with age, especially pro singers. He's using different techniques to reach higher notes these days but if they're relatively new to him he probably can't use them that often... think of it as vocal stamina.

Tbh for me Jon's always been about the showmanship anyway, he's worked out ways around the bits he can't sing anymore so it's luckily for him not such a big issue.

Should be the same with Richie's voice then.

This high, clear tone he had on Stranger in this town seems to be gone completely nowadays.
Now there's more a kind of low, rough, bluesy tone in his voice, probably also due to the escapades he had between 2005 and 2008.

He skips a lot of words live also, just as Jon does.... which means it's Dave, Hugh and Bobby who keep the vocal parts stable.

I've noticed the same with Richie. The backing vocals on Prayer since 2006 haven't sounded nearly as good. I'm pretty sure they used a backing track on the chorus, but I'm also pretty sure that Richie was doing the backing vocals on the bridge.

Jon combines things so much like. He needs to enunciate. Instead of
"Ohhh, we're half way there"
it's
"EEEEOhhhweeafweetheeah".

It bugs the hell out of me how he puts that "E" in front of everything.

He's been doing that ever since 2000 and during Crush and OWN tours it was thousand times more frequent and annoying that it is nowadays IMO.

I just listened to three performances of Prayer from 2000-01 and found 2 of those "E"s combined, and in ONE performance from 2010 I found 3. He even did it twice in London 95.

That's just one song. Compare Blaze Of Glory from 2001 to 2010 (or 2008, because in 2010 it was quite a rarity).

If you notice the way he sang up to the Bounce tour and since the HAND tour, his technique seems to have changed significantly since 2005. IMO, he sings way better now than on the Bounce tour, he's a lot more consistently good, but you can't deny that the change in tone and technique is really noticeable.....