Growing up, my parents always played artists like Alanis Morissette, Aerosmith and Michael Jackson, so I just grew to love their music. And I just love so many diverse artists for different reasons; some for their instruments, some for their edge, some for their vocals.
I fancied being a lead singer. I’ve always done a lot of vocals, but obviously, Freddie is the lead singer.
It was fine at the start but there’s always politics in any band. It just happened that I always got more vocals than everybody else, so in terms of people wanting their voice heard, that wasn’t happening. It made people, very bitter.
I want to be able to show my vocals off and when I do do live performances, I’m going to do some acoustics just with a guitar and a stripped back version.
With Rage, we wrote riff rock and had rap vocals, so we didn’t really concern ourselves with melody for the most part.
Getting comfortable again and being in a vocal booth on the opposite end of the spectrum, when you’re normally the one tracking the vocals, is kind of scary.
For ‘The Anthem,’ a lot of my fans were like ‘Oh, man, he’s getting lazy making just, like, a pop format tune that everyone’s doing these days.’ But on this album, I wanted to write songs with vocals that would get stuck in my head, not just movements of instrumentals.
I want to make an album with just great beats and big vocals and just amazing lyrics.
Pat Simmons and I always had a great blend together. We did the background vocals on a Little Feat track called ‘Red Streamliner,’ and that was great fun. I always really loved the way it turned out.
When I was growing up… I’m not going to say I listened to everything, but when it comes to vocals, I was really adamant about imitating all kinds of voices.
My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals… they’re screaming-growling stuff… and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, ‘Hats off to you.’
I used to chop up C-Span soundbites or interviews with politicians like John Kerry or Bill Clinton into a radio-esque show hosted by Awkwafina and her producer, Mookie. I would pitch down my vocals to have male guests and would send them to a small circle of friends after they were done.
I started as a guitarist and couldn’t find a decent singer, so I started providing my own vocals.
Hip-hop I never really got really into mainly just because I’m not a big fan of rap. I do like R&B artists like Beyonce. I’m a big fan of her mainly because of her vocals. They’re just so awesome. I love her and Christina Aguilera, and that whole urban kind of feel is really great, especially with my voice.
I’ve listened to female vocalists my whole life. That’s what I love. I still listen to guys’ vocals and don’t get taken aback a lot.
Whenever I’m home, I haven’t got any makeup on. But even in the studio, before I do vocals, I put makeup on.
I’ve always loved the sound of female vocals.
A lot of the time, in pop music especially, there’s reverb. And the reason is that reverb makes vocals sound better 99% of the time. It makes the notes ring out.
But when I record my next studio album, of course I’ll do the lead vocals.
I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn’t matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you’ve taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song.
What we look for when we need to find someone who can fit in with our music, the vocals and the harmonies and the way they blend are very important to us because if you listen to Beach Boys music, the harmonies, not only are the notes being sung, but there’s a blend to it. The voices have to blend.
I played guitar and bass. I didn’t do much vocals, although I did have one band where I was the lead singer. But that was when I was in college.
Maybe I was just born with a little bit of vocals or natural talent, but I feel like I taught myself. I just started taking vocal lessons to just work on my breathing, my vowels and stuff.
There are a lot of people using technology that are playing to a click with backing vocals already stuck in there on some computerized thing that runs along in time to the show so they have these amazing vocals that are only partly the guys on stage producing them at the time.
I wanted to be a musician and studied vocals in London for a year and then I gave it up.
When Alcatrazz played in Japan in early ’84, the record label offered me the opportunity to do a solo album while continuing to play in the band. I wanted the whole album to have vocals, but the record company didn’t want that. Initially, the album was released solely in Japan.
Along with ‘Free,’ where I sing quite a bit, there are additional songs on ‘Skin’ where you can hear my voice in the background – lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs.’ But more often than not, I use my vocals to prompt other rappers and singers to feel calmer, better, bolder.
I pay such close attention of the record making process that most people would assume are very little and wouldn’t be that big of a deal; the packaging, the title, and the harmonies, I think, are arguably as important as the lead vocals.
As I am a lyrical singer, I really have to work hard. I’m still really training on a daily basis on my vocals. Because of the lyrical training, it never really ends.
I was in bands many years ago, so that’s where it started. I played in bands, sang backing vocals and all the rest of it.
I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.
But I would lie on the floor and analyze everything. I’d listen to all the strings and the background vocals on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and try to pick out the different instruments.
Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ was a perfect song. It was so beautiful and so heartfelt. Her vocals were so amazing. And, for me, that was a song I went to when I was feeling sad and wanted to feel even sadder.
Under-sung vocals can be very sexy because of the intimacy, but they can be just as heartbreaking for the same reason.
I’ve always wanted my music to have that desperation, where you just want to strip your clothes off and run down the highway. I want the feeling where you don’t really know what to do with yourself – in the vocals, in the production. Everything.
In India, however good your western vocals are, you have to have that Indianess in your singing if you want to become a mainstream artiste.
I didn’t want to put out ‘The Unseen’ because I thought I would be criticized. I thought everyone would think the sped-up vocals were a gimmick. I had to be convinced to put it out.
There’s a lot of trickery that can go on in the studio, and there’s a lot that one can do – none of which I am interested in even slightly. I mean, you can actually tune vocals and stuff like that, but it’s so hideous, I can’t believe it.
I sing a few backing vocals but Im not much of a singer. You wont see me on ‘X Factor.’
The records I make, I’m there from the writing of the first note through the click tracks to the miking of the drums to the editing of everything to the production to the vocals to the artwork.
‘Chandelier’ took, like, four minutes to write the chords, then, like, 12-15 minutes to write the lyrics. Probably 10 or 15 minutes to cut the vocals.
I wasn’t personally that familiar with the Classic Rock bands. That is where Jorn Viggo came in: he played me tons of that stuff – Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, plus a lot of bands with cool songs, riffs, vocals, etc. We really listened to tons of music.
If I’m playing with Ozzy it’s just a guitar thing. But with the vocals I feel like I’m studying for the SATs.
I had my first band. it was kind of a progressive metal band kind of thing. I just started writing songs that required more and more challenging vocals, and I just did them. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? So I just sort of did what I had to do to make the songs sound the way I wanted them to.
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