Music’s hard men sing in falsettos
source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/5624295/Jeff-Buckley-musics-hard-men-tune-in-to-the...
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“There’s a power in the transition from a strong chest voice to fragile falsetto,” says rising star and falsetto-user Dan Black, who’s set to play three sets at Glastonbury. “It intimates the frailty of being human, of being alive.”
If this gradual increase towards ubiquity can be placed at anyone’s door, it is Jeff Buckley, who appeared from New York’s coffee house scene in the early Nineties utilising novel vocal techniques.
Buckley died in a drowning accident in 1997 but not before globally touring his debut album Grace for two years, spreading his influence far and wide. Thom Yorke saw him in 1994 and immediately realised the potential of such a vocal style, making Radiohead Buckley’s first high-profile disciples.
“What’s interesting about Buckley and Radiohead is that they’re going for different masculine representations than an earlier generation,” says University of Salford musicologist Dr Tim Wise. “Instead of singing about being hard and conquering women, now you get moments of weakness, vulnerable personae with their emotion represented by falsettos. The voice-breaking is analogous to being damaged.”
If this gradual increase towards ubiquity can be placed at anyone’s door, it is Jeff Buckley, who appeared from New York’s coffee house scene in the early Nineties utilising novel vocal techniques.
Buckley died in a drowning accident in 1997 but not before globally touring his debut album Grace for two years, spreading his influence far and wide. Thom Yorke saw him in 1994 and immediately realised the potential of such a vocal style, making Radiohead Buckley’s first high-profile disciples.
“What’s interesting about Buckley and Radiohead is that they’re going for different masculine representations than an earlier generation,” says University of Salford musicologist Dr Tim Wise. “Instead of singing about being hard and conquering women, now you get moments of weakness, vulnerable personae with their emotion represented by falsettos. The voice-breaking is analogous to being damaged.”
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