5 Singers Lying to Us All About Their Real Voice
Spend a few moments talking with a famous singer, and you might be surprised by what you hear. “What the hell is that?” you might ask, listening to what comes out of their mouth. “There’s no melody at all. I don’t hear any instruments. You aren’t even rhyming.” You may turn violent, and the police will need to intervene.
Later, when you are cuffed and in the hospital bed, the doctors will explain to you, “They were speaking. Speaking and singing are different.”
“Ohhhhh,” you say. “I get it now.”
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But even so, with some singers, the difference between their singing and speaking voices might be more than you could ever predict.
Shaggy
You might describe Shaggy’s voice as Jamaican. More specifically, you might describe his voice as “Shaggy” because no one else sounds quite like that, but you’d still summarize the accent as Jamaican. That makes sense. The guy was born in Kingston.
Since he really is Jamaican by birth, you can accurately call his voice Jamaican no matter what it’s like. Still, his real voice is nothing like how he sings. In the video below, he does the “Shaggy voice” for roughly two seconds and then reverts to his own natural voice, revealing the Shaggy one to be just a character.
He modeled that character after a drill instructor of his. This was an American drill instructor, as he served in the United States Marine Corps from the age of 19. He tried that voice as a gag in one song, “Oh Carolina,” and then he found himself stuck using it professionally for the rest of his life. It was like Gilbert Gottfried adopting that squawk late in his life and never giving it up, except Shaggy’s not doing it to be funny.
T-Pain
With other artists, you can easily tell their singing voice is artificial and an act. T-Pain is famous for using Auto-Tune. So, you would have to assume that when unassisted by electronics, he’s just a guy who can’t sing very well.
But few of us understand what Auto-Tune really is. Pitch correction is a technology that tweaks how people sing, and pop songs use it much more commonly than you’d think. We could fairly err on the side of assuming that every single pop hit today uses it. You can’t hear it because it’s not designed to be noticed. It’s designed to fix notes so that they sound correct.
When T-Pain, in contrast, sings in such a way that we all identify it as Auto-Tune, he’s not using the program for its intended pitch correction function. He’s jacking it to the max to achieve a deliberate sort of distortion. The result is output that sounds distinctive in a novelty way but doesn’t actually succeed at tweaking notes the way Auto-Tune is supposed to.
Which is fine because it turns out T-Pain is actually great at singing. The big lie he pushes when singing is that he needs Auto-Tune. That’s his gimmick, but he sings even better without it:
Quite A Few Women Speak Higher Than They Sing
Ava Max has a trademark deep singing voice. This owes nothing to studio manipulation, as the below acoustic performance sounds just as deep as any other:
Having read this far, you’ve already guessed that she speaks in a higher voice than that. Even knowing that, you’re probably imagining her voice being somewhat low-pitched, and possibly with a foreign accent, maybe Albanian. Here’s how she really sounds when she speaks:
In fact, this is quite common among women who sing. There’s a good chance that you know Christina Aguilera’s speaking voice, as well as her singing voice. Did it occur to you, though, just how different the two are? In “What a Girl Wants,” she bounces between singing and talking, alternating between two distant s, because that’s just how voices work sometimes.
And Quite A Few Men Speak Lower
On the other hand, you’ll sometimes be listening to a man sing, and he’s a bit higher than average. Below is Charlie Puth, and you might expect his speaking voice to veer on the high side as well.
Nope. You can listen to him speak, and it’ll leave you feeling like the voice contrasts weirdly with his singing and also with his actual face.
Or how about Noel Gallagher from Oasis? You’ve heard him on plenty of songs, and you have to imagine that he speaks with that same nasal voice.
His speaking voice is really different. And to show it to you, rather than pasting in a video of him talking, we’d like to let you listen to “Wibbling Rivalry,” an Oasis interview that was released as its own single in 1995. The nine-minute interview, full of static, features Liam Gallagher sounding lower than when he sings and Noel sounding lower still. It also features them yelling and swearing at each other.
This recording, which was never played on the radio and contains no music, entertained people enough that it went to number 52 on the British charts.
Michael Jackson
One singer who sang higher than his regular speaking voice deserves special recognition because he had one of the most famous voices in history. He also deserves special recognition because he maintained this high voice even when speaking publicly, most of the time. But occasionally, he let the mask slip.
Warning: When you listen to Michael Jackson speak in the below video, you’re not suddenly going to hear James Earl Jones’ voice coming out of his mouth. The voice is still high, by most standards. But it’s lower than the voice he put on most of the time.
Here’s another clip of him letting out a few words in his normal voice, which would score him a big 0.0 if he entered any Michael Jackson imitators contest:
It makes you wonder what else about his persona at the end of his life was artificial. Were his lips just pink tattoos? Were his eyebrows tattoos? Did he tattoo his scalp black and also wear a wig on top? The answers to those would be yes, on all three counts.
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