And yes, Sam Smith's falsetto sounds utterly smooth and earnest.
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Smith's falsetto was flawless and the backing singers were present.
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His haunting falsetto unwaveringly silenced the arena with unprecedented haste.
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His wailing falsetto turned repeated phrases into a keening litany.
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Audiences were initially startled by his high, almost falsetto voice.
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Maroon 5 have long been practicing some dark magic that makes Adam Levine's falsetto the catchiest thing you hear when you turn on the radio — possibly because it's the only falsetto you will hear.
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The arrangements are sparse, using ache and tremor, an easygoing falsetto.
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It's mainly just him and an acoustic guitar singing a delicate falsetto.
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From a few doors down, a high falsetto voice lured me in.
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Regardless, Youngblood's aching falsetto more than makes up for the missed opportunity.
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All of it delivered in a shimmery falsetto over a patient backbeat.
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His boyish voice remains steady and even, pushing up into falsetto range.
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Add some falsetto and the resulting track has definite Beach Boys vibes.
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"I'm somewhere south of Wichita," Wayne Coyne sings, in his watery falsetto.
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"I really, really, really wanna love you," he croons in an aching falsetto.
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For anyone to interpret Mr. Blake's falsetto that way would be a truism.
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Universal High is cleaner, boasting sax sections, falsetto vocals, and crisp rhythm sections.
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Was this the same voice I just heard singing in that vulnerable falsetto?
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Likely he's a tenor, and more often than not, he'll sing in falsetto.
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The internal space just makes the R&B songwriter and falsetto belter R.Lum.
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Reinhart dances near the top of her range in a tired, almost bored falsetto.
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And all the while, Vernon sings strange lyrics in that angelic falsetto of his.
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The two new songs are complicated, freak folk explorations that feature Vernon's signature falsetto.
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The wind guarding that patch of dirt or water will whistle with celestial falsetto.
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Brutal as a rapper, tender as a balladeer, swooping smoothly from bass to falsetto.
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Willis closed his eyes behind the mask and sang in an agony-filled falsetto.
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Still, serpentwithfeet somehow floats above it, a delicate falsetto fluttering, calm in the center.
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A strained falsetto vibrates through it all, never quite settling or dominating its environment.
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Mr. Fontana sings beautifully, in a novel tenor-falsetto blend, and nails every joke.
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His vocal range alone is difficult to pin down: a falsetto, a clipped rap.
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More prosaically, Waits has a falsetto and a basso, a holler and a croon.
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Singing in falsetto is, by definition, a kind of false projection into the world.
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Win Butler's voice works fairly well, save for the falsetto moments that trip him up.
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Luckily for us, we can start by being serenaded by singer Gallant's silky smooth falsetto.
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There's also a half-duet between Vernon's ordinary falsetto and his squeaky, digital chipmunked self.
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" Next song, in glass-shattering falsetto: "It feels so natural, natural / When we come together.
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And that's before he even emits that piercing falsetto, closer to the three-minute mark.
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Together, the two falsetto geeks knock out a minute-long 'N Sync-style dance routine.
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"I love Dan's falsetto and the imagination in his lyrics," Diplo wrote in an email.
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" She hops into a rare falsetto on early cut "Boogers" and 2013's "These Paths.
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Stigwood helped steer them away from ballads and toward falsetto-tinged disco, which revived their career.
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Dupuis lets her falsetto run, breathing a little air into the track when it gets claustrophobic.
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He sang as a soul belter, a rocker, a bluesy ballad singer and a falsetto crooner.
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"Out, out, damned spot, I say!" an actor screams in falsetto, batting wildly, and everyone laughs.
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He is a superb singer, too, with a falsetto scream as expressive as James Brown 's.
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" In his sultry falsetto he sings, "Nothing else burns like you / Ripping my shirt off you.
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Hynes's effervescent falsetto often obscures the painful stories that shadow the album's overriding sense of joy.
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It's got a really good bassline, and Ingrosso sings it all in a whispery, humid falsetto.
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Tru's charisma is on full show, leading the crowd through every snap, hip-thrust, and falsetto jump.
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"You gotta sing it loud!" the NBA star yells as they go for the song's falsetto notes.
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Even adding an Ariana-esque whistle falsetto, Tori Kelly pushed the boundaries of her already unlimited range.
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It begins as a plaintive, piano-accompanied pop song with S-AB's slender falsetto taking center-stage.
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Farther away, we heard a choir's wrenching yodels, traditional wordless songs alternating between falsetto and chest voice.
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Rumors have been circulating for years that Michael Jackson's famous falsetto was the result of chemical castration.
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The lyrics are shallow, the production is generic, and the lack of falsetto is flat-out disappointing.
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It's a slinky and kinetic mass of syncopated funk, adorned with unexpected piano lines and falsetto flights.
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The sound these youngest boys make comes across as utterly natural yet somehow transient, a haunting falsetto.
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I remember him batting his eyelashes as he said it, delivering the name in a coquettish falsetto.
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Vernon's falsetto is still identifiable through the digital scrim, but now the words wobble beyond his control.
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" He hummed a little bit of a tune and then, in a falsetto voice, sang, "Oh, baby . . .
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But something not just soulful in his lithe falsetto, gruff baritone, and warm midrange made the fantasy irresistible.
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It's gentle, with funk overtones weaved into a piercing falsetto that finds him singing about paranoia and fear.
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Hull's voice is delicate in the verses, dangerously fragile in the falsetto choruses, backed by three gentle guitars.
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And the cult of Bon Iver has never not been centered in Vernon's vulnerable, backwoods, falsetto-voiced masculinity.
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Sumney sings in a quavery drawn-out falsetto whose sweet, awkward quirkiness might better befit a backup singer.
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For a band best known for tender falsetto and literary references, their fifth record is remarkably, well, uncomplicated.
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Mr. Blake's other ace is his falsetto range, which he uses for easily 70 percent of his singing.
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More striking still, he dispensed with countertenor falsetto in that number and sang in his natural baritone voice.
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With "Holy Terrain," FKA Twigs combines her signature falsetto and hypnotic style with a radio-ready trap beat.
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Syd makes her falsetto sound effortless, and the guitarist Steve Lacy's solos suggest a new-era Ernie Isley.
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Falsetto, which comes from the Italian word for false voice, has been around for a very long time.
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Kimbra sings where Prince would switch to falsetto; Tank (of Tank & the Bangas) gets a quick rapping cameo.
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Now she's singing in the soprano range without resorting to a falsetto — and delighting critics in the process.
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He'll get older, and as he does, he's going to stop using his falsetto so much, he said.
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Julian Ehlrich's falsetto is yearning but brimming with confidence, a more powerful iteration than on the band's debut.
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The loop has hi-hat sounds and syncopated synthesizers — from Disclosure — as Khalid hops between tenor and falsetto.
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What is Hayden Thorpe saying when he sings in that mellifluous falsetto, "That's how I get my bang"?
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His brief flights into falsetto—even the handclaps he lays in at the end—can't cover-up his depression.
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With a voice that soared from a baritone to a falsetto, he spoke of carrying on against the odds.
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You can hear it, too, in the track's muscular progressions and turnarounds, and Acosta's alternately delicate and defiant falsetto.
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Francis launches into a fragile falsetto for the chorus in what might be his most earnest expression of yearning.
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No features this time, just a Graceland-esque chorus to punctuate things and a warm falsetto interlude from Antonoff.
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And for extra credit, here's a 65-plus-song playlist of some of the best falsetto moments in music.
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" Its Freddie Mercury high notes and falsetto rock choruses once led Buzzfeed to warn: "Do not attempt without alcohol.
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Then and now, Prophet sings in an imploring falsetto and creates sparse, slinky tracks that twinkle with electronic keyboards.
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Lanez closes the song with his rendition of "Falsetto," a reminder of just how extensive The-Dream's influence is.
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And dig how casually he varies his falsetto with bass-baritone chant-raps and juices his keyboards with percussion.
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O'Shaughnessy has a solid falsetto and the song is well-constructed, but it's really just a straightforward acoustic ballad.
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He draws the piano out in luxurious flourishes and glides between his perfect falsetto and a powerful mid-range vocal.
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The most beautiful ones are those intimate ones where you let that roundness, that falsetto, that head voice set in.
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Ehrlich sang along to Kakacek's summery, twangy riffs in a soft falsetto and in no time, they'd written a song.
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If only the voice undergoing deconstruction weren't a gushy high falsetto barely capable of enunciation even before it got digitized.
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Here were two examples of records whose punches were weary, patient, dystopian, abstracted, complicated, with much stillness and falsetto singing.
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Their version of "Skin" sees Charnley mirroring Boucher's vaporous falsetto, elsewhere, the electronics of "Genesis" are reproduced by layering instruments.
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His falsetto and her belting push themselves into the same space; sometimes they trade verses, sometimes they split single lines.
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" But by the end of the song, she breaks through the refrain, whispering in falsetto: "I have it, I have.
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At times, he has leaned more deeply into funk and R. & B., refining his falsetto and doing the splits onstage.
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And it was accomplished simply by being, or singing in a falsetto, or expressing desire, or by dreaming of liberation.
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His radiant falsetto imperceptibly dims into catacombs of vocal fry, or sails out and wavers as pristinely as a chime.
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It is a perfect storm of a debut single: technically astounding falsetto vocals, inoffensive-but-memorable production, a rousing chorus.
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White shared vocals with longtime member Philip Bailey, whose wide vocal range and gorgeous falsetto were a signature of the group.
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It's a step forward for lead singer Jasmyn Burke too, her voice tipping into falsetto and delighting in its own versatility.
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Lyrically, Thundercat uses his soft falsetto to play around with absurdist humor, singing to cats while making love songs about drugs.
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The music troughs and peaks with sub bass beats that levitate into moments of sublime celestial beauty carried by Kreslina's falsetto.
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"Redbone" and "Terrified," two falsetto ballads laced with paranoia and fear, stay poised between plush vocal-group soul and synthesizer subversion.
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When he hits that falsetto, it's like patron saints D'Angelo and Maxwell themselves are lifting him up to some celestial register.
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Moses Sumney has a voice that can melt hearts: a gently grainy tenor that often ascends into an immaculate, unearthly falsetto.
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Mr. Pitt's rich, rangy voice became the group's centerpiece, sometimes soaring to a falsetto over the deeper harmonies of the others.
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He has lent his falsetto to the supple synth-pop of Poliça and to the downcast electronic balladry of James Blake.
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Arthur: He's more likely to come to the inauguration dressed as a leprechaun and sing his oath of office in falsetto.
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At this point, the origin story of Bon Iver's falsetto-blessed spiritual leader Vernon is as well documented as Captain America's.
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He glided through long melismas, placing each touch of vibrato or grain neatly and moving in and out of his otherworldly falsetto.
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Over a lone, reverberating guitar, Allison slides in and out of a high falsetto, still fixated on feeling like a mistreated pet.
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It's a fine song, a particularly danceable number in Antonoff's catalog that's anchored by Dew's silky falsetto, but it doesn't really land.
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Take "715 CRΣΣKS," one of the album's best songs: Vernon's trademark falsetto comes through in a thick vocoder haze, deep and digital.
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And, puh-kee, ee, ee, ooh, wah, he works his voice up the musical scale, until, ultimately, he finds his lost falsetto.
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Decked out in an extremely minimal suit jacket and ruffled sleeves, Hadreas's falsetto holds up remarkably as the song reaches its crescendo.
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Built with a strong disco foundation, the pianos dance under her booming vocals and even give her whistled falsetto room to breathe.
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"You watched it all on Pay-Per-View, stationary cameras giving you a private view," Remy sings in a genuinely moving falsetto.
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He sang in a deep, gravelly voice that combined singing and mumbling, but he also deployed a falsetto of sorts on occasion.
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A neat little guitar figure leads into a cavern of sumptuous, underwater synthesizer reverb, as Jonghyun croons in his highest, sweetest falsetto.
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Guitarists like Mr. Pahinui also accompanied their own singing, using the sweetly sustained tone, wide vibrato and rich falsetto of Hawaiian tradition.
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On the single, NNAMDÏ' throws his voice and contorts it into a pitch-shifted falsetto over a booming, bass-heavy backing track.
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Swae Lee is making his pitch to sing the National Anthem at Super Bowl LV next year ... by showing off his falsetto.
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The role of Polifemo has an enormously wide vocal range that took Mr. Tines from chesty low tones to falsetto-like highs.
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One time, I surrendered and played therapist with him, sprawling on the couch while he asked me questions in a woman's falsetto.
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Rowe's voice wasn't just flawless—sliding easily between a croak and a resonant falsetto in the breakdown of "The Weekend"—it was rich.
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When Drake, a Canadian rapper, released his eagerly awaited album last week, one of its most talked-about tracks featured Jackson's falsetto vocals.
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And then there are the precisely tuned falsetto woooooo's that punctuate the whole thing and turn it into a church service of sorts.
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Couples were embracing each other and swaying while Bon Iver sang "For Emma," one of his most beloved songs, in his distinctive falsetto.
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Cook couldn't hold his falsetto, and it started to unravel when the melodies demanded more of his vocals, but it was never boring.
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On "Scandalous" he sings in his serrated falsetto, "Tonight I'm gonna be your fantasy", purposefully objectifying himself, and taking pleasure in women's pleasure.
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His is a versatile falsetto that flickers between feeling like intimate address to a lover and a classically trained soprano under a spotlight.
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"I Might Need Security" samples a Jamie Foxx bit—"fuck you, fuck you, fuck you" in falsetto—but it's more confrontational than comic.
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Yachty rapped or sang in a playful, spaced-out falsetto; he was dark-skinned, with hair that was dyed red, braided, and beaded.
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At First Avenue, he proved a mellifluous falsetto for hire, especially on "The Beautiful Ones," whose climax he lifted with his nimble squall.
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"I haven't listened to too much Curtis Mayfield," Sampha admitted, but Russell insisted that the two vocalists shared more than a fine falsetto.
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The first song we properly hear in the movie is the manic, off-kilter falsetto of "New York, New York" by Nina Hagen.
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Mac Daddy and Mr. 33s Soundtrack float perfectly alongside Thundercat's dreamy falsetto, all while the jazz punk shows off his brilliant bass skills.
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Perennially brilliant, falsetto-loving indie dudes Whitney brought out Savemoney rapper and fellow Chicagoan Joey Purp at a now-dry-enough Lollapalooza yesterday.
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Dipping into his winsome falsetto for the song's chorus, Casablancas sounds like he's actually having fun here, trying out new cadences and inflections.
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In the chorus, she finds a heady falsetto register she's never used before, and she sounds unrecognisable—but it's not uncanny, it's exciting.
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On his first solo album, it's like his urges and falsetto finally have the house to themselves — and there are no parents around.
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"You're not around/So hard to get over it/Tried to get under it/Stuck in between," Thundercat sings in an echoing falsetto.
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As written in the score, the tenor's line indeed lifts to a near-impossible high F, probably sung quasi-falsetto in Bellini's day.
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Her voice contains bits of Joni Mitchell—a kind of gasping delicacy—though it can also recall the wounded falsetto of Smokey Robinson.
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It's light and airy, yet oozes with sensuality as the EXO member's tenor fills each nook of the song with his dulcet falsetto.
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Starting only with Mr. Smith's mocking falsetto and a tip-tapping high hat, the song ramps up to a climax of knotty guitars.
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I think if I trained for two years and never talked, I could hit that falsetto once but then it would go away.
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That and his legendary voice, which rang stunningly clear in an effortless falsetto during "A Case of U." He sounded ... not to be human.
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The sparkling falsetto, the biting thwack of drums, the purple splashes of reverb-soaked electric guitar, the flashing shots of synth, the flagrant theatrics.
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Love a man who can really work a falsetto and really hit those notes you didn't know a dude could reach on the regular.
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But what really left an impression on me was his uncanny falsetto, which seemed to lift up the audience with every word he crooned.
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The soft verses of "County" call back to Giannascoli's falsetto past before borrowing a bassline and beat from Steely Dan for an instrumental break.
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"If you've got feelings for me, you've just got to speak honestly," she sings in a sugary falsetto over gorgeous, effervescent layers of synth.
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"Yer Blues," most familiar as a high-wattage shouter, appears as a slow jam, with Lennon singing the verses in a self-parodying falsetto.
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"On Battleship Hill's caved-in trenches / A hateful feeling still lingers," she sings on "On Battleship Hill," her voice curling into an astonishing falsetto.
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In the end, Mr. Martin chose a combination of the harmonica and the sung line (sans falsetto), which establishes the song's bright character immediately.
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Singer Casey Burge's falsetto is light and loving, the middle eight conjures images of sticky summer days where everything looks like a Polaroid snap.
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As a singer, Joni was sentimental, soaring off into undeniably feminine falsetto on a whim and writing labyrinthine lyrics that often seemed dewey-eyed.
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Then, at the end, he drops the falsetto; his voice has a low-fi rattle now, like he's almost too close to the microphone.
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Flanked by two backing vocalists, a percussionist, a drummer and a bassist, Josh and Tom played, sang in falsetto and danced around on stage.
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He sang about tragic love in an operatic falsetto, over orchestral timbres laced with sampled screams; he shrieked and cackled and brandished a whip.
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"Blow me from the side of the mountain / Blow my head off," Anohni sings, in a quivering falsetto, searching out the drone's camera eye.
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Frank Ocean's piercing falsetto on its own ("'Cause I've been thinkin' 'bout forevaaaa") was enough to make this song one of the decade's best.
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Even as someone who's never been about The Weeknd this is where he really gets to stretch into full falsetto, to the highest impact.
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The Fate's inimitable falsetto vocals and guitar wizardry make them metal enough for opera claws but hilarious enough for putting on capes and facepaint.
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If you haven't discovered Siba yet, he's the rising Copenhagen singer/producer whose shimmering falsetto hits your heart just as quickly as his synth lines.
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And in his suavely tender falsetto, Romeo Santos tells her how desirable she is, how jealous he is and how he can't live without her.
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Green's original is streamlined, confident, beautiful in how delicately his falsetto merges with the effortless glide of the strings and the propulsive Hi Rhythm beat.
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The falsetto described above — his killer move — is like a geyser hidden in the woods, a natural phenomenon whose source you can't quite figure out.
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The pop singer, famed for his falsetto, will play seven concert performances with his band, the Four Seasons, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater from Oct.
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Zayn's video, appropriately, is a minimalist black and white studio video with lots of filters and plenty of room for his signature falsetto to breathe.
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They also sang it, twice using the syllables "da-da-da, da-da, dun dun da," and once with a falsetto floating across the top.
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She's a gifted producer, a smart songwriter, still getting to grips with a voice that meanders between a wispy falsetto and a soulful mid-range.
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His 2016 debut EP, Memoria, is full of jangling electric guitar and honey-sweet falsetto, interspersed with the odd rap feature and heavy instrumental breakdown.
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Behind me were two teenage boys, one of whom yelled out, "Move, ya old fart!" followed by the falsetto laugh that only teenagers can produce.
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Anchoring it all is Toledo's voice, a groggy monotone freed from reverb and capable of breaking into a nuanced baritone, full-throated screams, and falsetto.
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He holds the Macbook up to our ears and we lean in to hear his son, known for his falsetto, here sounding like Frank Sinatra.
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It is in all likelihood that Gallant's arching falsetto will soundtrack countless bouts of tender lovemaking from now until neo-neo-soul becomes a thing.
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Flamboyant boogie-woogie piano romps through "She's My Baby," spurring a rambunctious vocal that breaks into falsetto as Little Richard would a few years later.
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But since he's not one to shy away from waving his own freak flag, Darius is not entirely put off by this falsetto-voiced oddball.
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A dramatic synth line has been excised completely, too, which unearths a wordless falsetto intonation that had been far below the surface in the original.
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"My body is a burden / I'm always yearning / To be less accommodating / To say aloud how I'm feeling," she sings in a tightly wound falsetto.
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All we'd heard from him was "To Move On," a jaunty, falsetto-tinted track that sounded as though it been lifted from three generations at once.
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With a voice that dipped down to baritone and leapt into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of human impulses that could not be quantified.
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To divorce his words from his wailing falsetto is to sap their power (and would you even know what he's saying if it weren't for AZLyrics.com?).
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The adopted son of a pleureuse, a professional singer at funerals, he learned to sing in church, perfecting the keening falsetto that would remain his trademark.
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" He added: "I can sing falsetto, but I really can't go much higher that way than I can otherwise, and the quality is not the same.
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"Timmy's Prayer" has a buttery falsetto hook, and when performing it live, Sampha even gets up from behind the keys to shake his hips a bit.
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Leslie Odom Jr. won a Tony for portraying Aaron Burr in "Hamilton," where he flaunted a creamy falsetto, a jagged howl and a pristine rap flow.
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" In 1973, Eastman wrote "Stay on It," which begins with a syncopated, relentlessly repeated riff and a falsetto cry of "Stay on it, stay on it.
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His sweet falsetto floats above sustained but wobbly synthesizers, eventually joined by processional drums and a ghostly chorus, sounds that only expand the void around him.
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There are vocal effects — Hjarne, whose music lies sadistically low even for a bass, sometimes soars into falsetto to evoke his madness — but little vocal impact.
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But while the Tony-winning original could soar to goosebump-inducing heights as heady as Frankie Valli's falsetto, the new production remains tied to the ground.
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His songs, driven by his spellbinding falsetto and skeletally spare synthesizers, shimmer plaintively, summoning up the LA nights that McMorrow consciously chose to make them in.
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I'm not sure, but those falsetto "woos" are beautiful, and the production is a dream, and the video itself is a nice fantasia of the Malibu beach.
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"They stole another story," Bassel Almadani wails in falsetto on "Lost," the lead single from his forthcoming album, Elements with his soul band Bassel and The Supernaturals.
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Organ, strings, and electric sitar form a delicate bed of fluffy golden feathers on which Prince can recline and sing in his highest, creamiest, most angelic falsetto.
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Sometimes, he sings with this lumpy falsetto and it sounds like when you're alone in the house and try and sing the high note in "Loving You".
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Jo Lee, 29, sings falsetto and identifies as a non-binary, mixed person of color, Tonewall has been vital to the realization and celebration of their identity.
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The band first gained fame in the late nineties with airy, falsetto-driven soundscapes; its recent work is heavy with guitars and drums, verging on black metal.
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Hunt even breaks out a falsetto on several tracks, which serves as a wildly unexpected but certainly welcome contrast to his usual inhuman howling and guttural roars.
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Mr. Rush's output for Cobra showcased his lacerating, vibrato-laden electric guitar lines and his gritty, gospel-inspired vocals — throaty mid-register groaning, thrilling leaps of falsetto.
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Fans of Borns's fabulous falsetto can find reasonable options on the resale market — or wait until he inevitably returns to headline at an even more formidable venue.
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In conversation, Parker's voice is a calm baritone; in his songs, it's a plaintive, sustained tenor and falsetto, higher and more fragile, a tone of exposed emotions.
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MOSES SUMNEY "Aromanticism" (Jagjaguwar) A manifesto disguised as a reverie, "Aromanticism" offers cascades of Mr. Sumney's falsetto vocals in rhapsodic songs, seemingly free-associative but meticulously plotted.
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Slow-burning electronic percussion crests into several waves of spiraling guitar leads over the song's runtime, with vocalist Francis Hooper's falsetto guiding the way through the churning arrangement.
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He doesn't need our collective chuckles for being on his phone while Timberlake warbled some falsetto notes into a microphone while wearing the Duck Dynasty dude's wedding garb.
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"When You Loved Me Least" makes the most of this Californian's vulnerable voice and his torn falsetto to communicate the romantic ouch in this downtempo R&B tune.
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Early every morning, a perfect falsetto disrupts Paul Thomas' dreams as Magoo, one of his talking African gray parrots, alerts him that it's time to face the day.
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When Clark tries to sing falsetto the effect is similarly forced, as his gruff voice is better suited to blunt anger or spacey detachment than corny sex songs.
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But, here more than ever, Shaw's voice is in a different universe, opening near a rich bass and cracking into a soft falsetto within a couple of seconds.
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J. set) (Friday) The eclectic funk-jazz collagist Sinkane blends soulful falsetto harmonies with the kind of slippery, tinny electronic percolations that could soundtrack a Nintendo 93 game.
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His laid-back vocals are backed only by a straightforward rock three-piece until a luxurious piano tumbles in for the chorus and DeMarco's falsetto harmonies kick in.
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De Augustine's gossamer acoustics and whisper-quiet falsetto remain intact, his musings on heartbreak still seeping nostalgia and utopias lost, but Bartlett's little flourishes fill the record out.
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But his spooky falsetto on OK Computer made you sympathize with that creep, who now sounded as if he was serving a life sentence in a Robotropolis prison.
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They ponder faith, pleasure, exile and belonging; they traverse hymns, neo-soul, South African pop and electronic dance music, and Nakhane's voice crests in a vibrant, androgynous falsetto.
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The vocals are definitely over the top, switching back and forth on some tracks between low growls and falsetto screeching that toes the line of tongue-in-cheek.
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Prince was also finding new sounds: pushing his voice into multiple personalities, from sweet falsetto to punk snarl to preacherly exhortation, and deploying sounds from the latest synthesizers.
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And then there was Jónsi, playing electric guitar with a cello bow to elicit droning, soaring, screeching, and ethereal tones, and singing in his stunning, gender-bending falsetto.
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The key moments between Orpheus (played by Damon Daunno, who sings in a stunningly controlled falsetto) and Eurydice (played with great tenderness by Nabiyah Be) are truly moving.
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Droste sounds as self-assured as he ever has, still in possession of a freeze-your-blood falsetto but only using it sparingly and for maximum emotional power.
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Dougy's exuberant falsetto, delayed guitar ripples, and galloping drums became synonymous with that delicious rush of falling in love (in a nice v-neck sweater vest and skinny tie).
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There's some serious heat (see what we did there?) in the embeds below—from the classic deep house of Pepe Bradock, to Craig David, and Yves Tumor's souful falsetto.
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I need not have worried though: while the 74-year-old doesn't have the falsetto voice he had five decades ago, he still has a good set of lungs.
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Evan Stephens Hall's voice is flawless, even when he flickers between his mid-range and falsetto; the song rises and falls around intricate guitar flurries; the harmonies never err.
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Bieber performed the track acoustically, "Love Yourself"-style — just him and his falsetto on a couch onstage, singing about how he wants to "fix" all of his girl's insecurities.
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Her voice has none of the grit of Rihanna's, and none of the glassiness of Bush's; but her coy falsetto still manages to get out a pretty stunning mashup.
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They take soul legend Al Green's "I'm Still in Love With You" and give it a gentle chop, leaving Green's grainy falsetto and the song's backing harmonies largely untouched.
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Recorded in Reykjavik and produced by Alex Somers (Sigur Ros), it's one of Reservoir's most delicate songs, laden with strings and muffled piano keys, the vocals almost in falsetto.
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Both the weirdest and most ambitious song they've ever written, it boasts Grote's newfound self-lacerating sarcasm and his falsetto, something he rarely used on the band's earlier albums.
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Several times he ordered his band to proceed behind him at very low volume or cut out completely, and he played delicately, singing the blues in a hurt falsetto.
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The movie delves into his highs and lows — celebrated as a falsetto master, he struggled offstage with drug addiction and spent five years in prison on drug trafficking charges.
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Intended for children 8 and older, it features Mr. Cannon, dressed in a kilt and brandishing a few props, incarnating all the roles, including a falsetto-voiced Lady Macbeth.
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This was an orchestra-only rehearsal, so Mr. Nézet-Séguin, 42, sang out odd bits of the text — sometimes in a tenor voice and sometimes in a decent falsetto.
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His falsetto vocals in "Feed the Babies" and "Pearl Cadillac" echo Curtis Mayfield and Prince, as he sings about parental responsibility and about his own gratitude to his mother.
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J. Set) (Tuesdays and Fridays) The eclectic funk-jazz collagist Sinkane blends soulful falsetto harmonies with the kind of slippery, tinny electronic percolations that could soundtrack a Nintendo 64 game.
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There are sure to be plenty of mic stand twirls, slick dance moves, and moments where Timberlake hypes up the crowd with a grin and a drawn-out falsetto note.
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Beneath Freddie Mercury's airy falsetto and soaring vocals, under the charming and now-infamous bass line, the scatting, and the gentle piano, "Under Pressure" is one heartbreaker of a song.
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Mr. Andres's "Mirror Songs" presented Mr. Kahane with a vehicle for his warm and unaffected baritone, with textual quirks and kinks rendered in odd intervals and sudden changes to falsetto.
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Although his voice showed strain at times, quavering at the top of his tenor range, Mr. McCartney still makes his most sophisticated melodies sound natural, and his falsetto stayed pure.
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We analyzed 20,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 using vocal data sourced from Pandora's Music Genome Project to figure out just how popular falsetto singing actually is.
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Maybe you know every line to "Bohemian Rhapsody," but you need to think outside the box for a minute to realize that some of those lines are sung in FALSETTO.
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Mr. Thackeray would pull a sari over his head and mimic the Italian-born daughter-in-law of the Nehru-Gandhi family in a high falsetto, mocking her fumbling Hindi.
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"I'd go to Jack and say, 'I have a chunk of melody in mind and I want to try a tight, syncopated falsetto, maybe like a Prince thing,' " she said.
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His voice was one of pop music's most distinctive, a mixture of quintessential American expression: the revivalist's falsetto, the crooner's ease, a rasp like David Ruffin's, the occasional exasperated holler.
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But it's also rich and varied, with Prince testing out every possible vocal variation and murmur and falsetto flight and bass dip and babyish croak over six-and-a-half minutes.
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Then there are the unexpected picks: Rihanna's edgy "Kiss It Better," R&B breakout Kehlani, ethereal cool-girl Banks, Donald Glover's falsetto-heavy Childish Gambino on "Redbone," breakout teen hitmaker Khalid.
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One of the signatures of the hook is SahBabii doing swooning Auto-Tuned vocal runs of "ooh-ooh" in the background, his robot falsetto setting a new benchmark for the sound.
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Lomax's son, Alan, carried on his work, with surveys of the folk music of Spain and Italy, including children's songs in dirt-poor Extremadura and falsetto extravaganzas by dockers in Genoa.
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Meantime, he's going to make the most of it, having fallen hard for Lola Cola (the veteran Jeff McCarthy, deftly switching from his baritone to a falsetto in his big number).
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Besides Wilson, the group includes founding Beach Boys rhythm guitarist Al Jardine, his son, Mike, who handles the lofty falsetto, longtime band fixture Blondie Chaplin, and a nine-piece backing band.
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But Post Animal don't feel the need to drown every last goddamn guitar in reverb, instead allowing tightly-wound, falsetto-leaning songs like "Ralphie" and "Special Moment" do their own work.
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" On "Wimoweh," Seeger, standing behind the other three singers with his long banjo, let loose "with his most elongated falsetto, a swooping curling ghost of a transmission from someplace far away.
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His pitched-up falsetto, gliding through the song's "mutating, colorful chords," make listening to "Earfquake" feel like a surrealist experience (in Tyler's own words, the harmonies sound "like a cloud melting").
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The album's lead single, "Two Weeks," is a veritable feast of everything that has made her an indie-pop icon: spectral falsetto, throbbing industrial beats, otherworldly magnetism, and taunting sexual power.
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The futuristic guitar riff, the reverberating howls, that vibrating, alien-high falsetto — there's a reason why the internet is obsessed with how "Redbone" would sound in the bathroom at a party.
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He began singing on these albums, nursing a bashful falsetto that's hazier than Eddie Holman's and grainier than André 3000's; it's among the most arresting modern pop has to offer.
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It was an orchestra-only rehearsal, so Mr. Nézet-Séguin sang out odd bits of the text — sometimes in a tenor voice, and, on a few occasions, in a decent falsetto.
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Alex Turner's voice has never been more agile—for evidence, consult his falsetto on "Star Treatment"—and the band's lounge-jazz adjacent musicianship throughout proves their versatility outside burly stadium rock.
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J. Set) (Friday) The eclectic funk-jazz collagist Sinkane blends soulful falsetto harmonies with the kind of slippery, tinny electronic percolations that could serve as the soundtrack for a Nintendo 64 game.
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Gibb is the last surviving member of the fraternal trio whose falsetto harmonies and disco beats powered huge 1970s hits including "How Deep is Your Love," &apos&aposStayin&apos Alive" and "Tragedy.
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But the real gift is Heynderickx's voice, which is versatile and compelling, swooning through falsetto to lull the listener into security before breaking into a formidable howl when you least expect it.
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Sampha's voice was commanding; over and over the crowd would start to sing along with songs, only to peter out as they found themselves unable to keep up with his tireless falsetto.
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During the falsetto outro of "Purple Rain," the DJ stopped the music, and many held up their lit phones (as suggested by Lee) and carried the rest of the song a capella.
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That's followed up by "Crying," boasting Kyp's Prince-like falsetto and a spry guitar riff that is so funky, it sounds like it could've been strummed by James Brown's axeman, Catfish Collins.
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Mr. Smith decided long ago that his voice was the instrument: melisma, whispered baritones, surprise out-of-nowhere ultra-high falsetto, even a haunting, beautiful croak of longing sprinkled here and there.
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People in the audience that night, including some colleagues from Colón, were startled when they heard Ms. Castillo hit high notes in the dramatic soprano range effortlessly without resorting to a falsetto.
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On his excellent 2015 single, "Them Changes," the falsetto clashes wrenchingly with the gray scene it narrates: "Now I'm sitting here with a black hole in my chest," he sings, almost gleefully.
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J. Set) (Tuesdays and Fridays through 230/2129) The eclectic funk-jazz collagist Sinkane blends soulful falsetto harmonies with the kind of slippery, tinny electronic percolations that could soundtrack a Nintendo 8 game.
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Prince's first major hit — released in 1979 — was a fairly straightforward disco track, sung in a Barry Gibb falsetto with a guitar part that wouldn't feel out of place on a Chic song.
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Until her untimely death in 2002, fellow vocalist Mary Hansen would act as the ying to Sadier's yang, their breezy, two-part harmonies offsetting Sadier's heavier, more stoic vocals with her sweet falsetto.
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There's keyboard coloring all over the place, a guitar solo so shriekingly high it could be a synthesizer, gorgeous soul falsetto, backup singers chiming in and giggling and blowing raspberries, glitz, sparkle, confetti.
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"Dazed and confused, so cute and paranoid," Yo Landi Visser sings in "Dazed & Confused", her whispy falsetto gliding over a sun-splashed beat, before Ninja dives in with an avalanche of 100mph bars.
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He was featured on Kanye West's "Heard 'Em Say" off the Late Registration album in 2005, and actually quite fittingly so, if you consider the latter artist's later embrace of falsetto and feelings.
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If he scrunches his face and channels his scarcely submerged demons, he can still hit that 218-proof Luciferian falsetto, but it's clear that time and other torments have tarnished his greatest weapon.
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His falsetto-heavy soul singer approach to electronic music angered some genre purists (like Portishead's Geoff Barrow), but his obvious talent in writing fascinating songs was enough to make the dissenters feel irrelevant.
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Gifted with an enveloping falsetto and sincere pen, Caesar is one of few artists who can make a record on the highs and lows of love feel butterflies-in-stomach light, not downcast.
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The EP, which follows 2015's standout LP Sightless, Unless, fuses plaintive guitar with frenetic beats, dissonant samples (think Burial, FlyLo, and a touch of Broken Social Scene), and layers of lustrous falsetto.
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In a song like "Im Traum," where he produced phrases in a silky head voice that faded to falsetto, it sometimes sounded like he was still experimenting with the effects of the microphone.
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He flexes his remarkable mid-register and falsetto, twisting and turning his voice around the foundation of the song's chorus, and opens up the song's possibilities, filling in gaps and creating new ones.
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"No Tomorrow" finds the Britpop stalwarts sounding as pitch-perfectly Suede as back in the 90s: those chiming, layered guitars, and Brett's sinuous tones reaching those elastic falsetto notes with ease and aplomb.
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Take "Right Next To You (For the Neighbors)," from Natural Causes: it's about the same sort of urban enjambment that Brick Body Kids tries to untangle, and it opens with an earworm falsetto.
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Whether for a small period-instrument ensemble or a massive Wagner orchestra, for Sir Bryn Terfel's clarion baritone or Philippe Jaroussky's ethereal falsetto, the sound was balanced and warm with absolute clarity of detail.
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In I'm Poppy, singer and social media star Poppy is getting her own TV show — which, she explains in her typical falsetto monotone, will let her spread high-quality content to the whole world.
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It's a pretty straightforward performance, which sees Levine flexing his objectively really good falsetto and, of course, Kendrick emerging about two thirds of the way through to subtly kill shit, as is his way.
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A couple of months have elapsed since I wrote a piece on these hallowed pages, profiling the mystery cloaked, balls-in-a-titanium-vice falsetto ad-libbing king of the MySpace age: DJ Rankin.
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While the voluminous, synth-sounding guitars (and vice-versa) and singer/producer Babette Hayward's throaty vocals move at a steady, calming throb, catch how Hayward reaches into her yearning falsetto range for the chorus.
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Donald Glover is too talented to get away with off-the-cuff spontaneity now: his falsetto is too soulful, his songwriting is too natural, his jokes are too funny, his smile is too disarming.
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But after a few minutes, he appeared to lose patience and cranked up the virtuosity — dancing, shredding on guitar, sliding from the depth-sounder bottom end of his vocal register into an otherworldly falsetto.
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Album opener "I Won't Pay" presents Rau at his most falsetto and Feldman at both his most electronic and glam rock, with a stark transition from synth to power chords and siren-sounding riffs.
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And on the whole, his songs are dreamlike and entrancing, from the soothing lullaby "Idk" to the deeply inspiring "Life Goes On." Dipping into his pseudo-falsetto, he recalls the woodlands specter Bon Iver.
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If they feel comfortable enough in their habitat, they may reward patient Maroon 5 watchers with their signature mating call: Adam Levine saying "yeah" over and over again in falsetto for three minutes straight.
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A particularly noteworthy aspect of Mr. Oberlin's voice was that unlike many countertenors before him — Mr. Deller included — and many after, he did not need to resort to falsetto to reach the highest notes.
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Co-produced by the ever-prolific Project Pablo, the song sees the vocalist wistfully recalling an encounter with a former lover, with the latter's fragile falsetto starkly contrasting the former's bass-heavy percussion patterns.
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As he sings about love at its most devotional and all-consuming, his androgynous voice arrives as a multitude — tenor and falsetto, whisper and proclamation, moan and chant — and it appears from all directions.
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Plenty has been made of Klinghoffer's status as John Frusciante's understudy, trained up to play these songs, learning his falsetto ideosyncracies and picking up the lead guitar trills that define the band's high points.
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"I'm a fallen alien / I never thought that you would be the one to tie me down," she sings on "Fallen Alien," her breathy falsetto floating above odd, cinematic piano keys and cavernous beats.
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The No. 224 song that day happened to be "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)," a novelty tune by The Chipmunks with David Seville that won three Grammys with its distinctive falsetto sound.
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The Man released their seventh LP, the Danger Mouse-produced Evil Friends, a compendium of psych-pop, with a burnished retro sheen, some debauched bass grooves, and occasionally, tunes topped off with a nimble falsetto.
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Ehrlich managed to juggle his duties as the band's lead singer and drummer, his reedy, lovelorn falsetto emerging from behind a full kit; Kakacek unspooled sweet, intricate guitar melodies a few steps to his right.
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He quoted hip-hop lyrics in speeches, sang "Amazing Grace" behind the pulpit of a black church and even performed a snatch of an Al Green ballad at the Apollo in a surprisingly competent falsetto.
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"His velvet falsetto and incomparable mastery of lyrical verse have created a tapestry of hits that have transcended generations and become a mainstay in American pop music," the Library of Congress said in a statement.
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Across those three tracks, Timberlake fashioned a new sound with the Neptunes, the production duo of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, shedding his pop-singer sheen for dirty drums, falsetto vocal runs, and, notably, guitar.
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The way Berryman stretches or puckers his face to hit a falsetto note, or to squeeze his voice into mournful diminished harmony with Moore and McGruder, seems to resurrect these lost prisoners and their woes.
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Synthesizers occasionally emerge as grounding devices, as when the buzzy keyboards in "New Love Cassette" pulse with reassuring regularity, but even then the steady beat has been subsumed by orchestral clouds and Olsen's spiraling falsetto.
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He's nobody's idea of a Luddite, but Thundercat — the electric bass whiz, falsetto soothsayer and underground prince of head-trippy future soul — has a message for those who stumble through the day glued to smartphones.
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Nowhere is the tightrope balance between personal and political commentary more evident though than on closing track "History Lesson," which sees Jaar adopting a doo-wop falsetto croon to deliver an incisive bullet point tutorial.
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The transition is intended to sound seamless, although since we can see Wilson on the giant video screen next to the stage, we know he's just trailed off and someone else picked up the falsetto.
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J.C. At first, as Milosh's whispery falsetto floats over serene guitar picking, wispy electric piano notes and a gently ticking beat, it seems like Rhye's "Song for You" would blow away in the slightest breeze.
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Even in his frequent short-breathed shouts, he retained quality if not beauty of tone, and at the end he ascended to a gentle falsetto, as if his voice were the soul leaving the body.
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Her plays "Nonsectarian Conversations With the Dead" (1985), "Organdy Falsetto" (1987) and "White Chocolate for My Father" (1990) were abstract, associative dramas that fused politics and poetry as they delineated the predicaments of black women.
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On "Drunk" — his third full-length, featuring cameos by Mr. Lamar, Michael McDonald and Pharrell Williams — the gravitational center floats in the air, where harmonies rarely resolve and synthesizers waft around his slap-happy falsetto.
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He has an ingratiating tenor that rises smoothly into falsetto, and for these songs he kept his piano parts subdued and transparent, with hints of Paul Simon, Randy Newman and Stephen Sondheim in their harmonies.
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Guest stars ranged from falsetto-voiced Tiny Tim to Richard Nixon, who once uttered one of the show's catch phrases - "sock it to me" - during an appearance in the midst of his 1968 presidential campaign.
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Unlike Cold Spring or 2010 debut Crooks & Lovers, Love What Survives whispers or growls directly into your ear; the voices you hear can skip from cracking into falsetto then belting out with a defiant clarity.
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When Francis Farewell Starlite, the founder and lead singer of Francis and the Lights, tells Mr Rubin that he is singing at the top of his vocal range, Mr Rubin asks him to try a falsetto.
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The spare, new wave synths and electric percussion that play over the video don't interfere with Doleman's breathy falsetto, which doesn't clash with the neon on-screen—but it all works collectively as a sensory jolt.
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Flanked by two dancers and a saxophonist, he opened with a brief cover of jazz standard "Afro Blue," easily commanding the audience with Prince-influenced, pealing bass riffs and a hushed falsetto few artists can match.
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And Tunde brought Kyp Malone, who provides the band with its famous falsetto and spazzed out guitar riffs, into the fold after sparking up a conversation with the former barista at Bedford Avenue's defunct Verb Cafe.
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It's a pop song from 2006, replete with a big, bratty "na na na" intro, a staccato piano verse, a Mickey Mouse Club pre-chorus, and a shit load of Rivers Cuomo's falsetto when it peaks.
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In 2011-12, mostly unnoticed, he released a track a week online for a year, forging his particular combination of crisply understated house beats, minor-key melodies, pop-song structures and, often, his own wispy falsetto.
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She and her band go off-script, as she trills the "all I want is you" hook over and over, in a cascading sequence of falsetto-range vocal runs that send a shiver down your back.
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The group, known for their Evolution series and weekly covers, is ready to put their vocal range (like Chris' falsetto on the hook) and Boyz II Men-level harmonies to use in their own original music.
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His earliest songs at Bon Iver found their resonance in his soulful, falsetto-heavy delivery (remember how hard "Only love is all maroon / Gluey feathers on a flume / Sky is womb and she's the moon" hit?).
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"Fortress" is unquestionably the most openly sexual song he's ever penned, each line sung in an almost reverent falsetto as he maps the heat between two people—the build up, the union, the post-coital haze.
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I don't know if you've heard him sing but his falsetto is pretty crazy and he'll just stack a million times and I just kind of like observing in the background while other people work and stuff.
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Over the snowy months, he holed up in his father's cabin and recorded what became 2715's For Emma, Forever Ago: 245 tracks that beautifully layered Vernon's sometimes auto-tuned falsetto, acoustic guitar, and an occasional horn.
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It feels almost like a dare: Prince is going to use his unearthly falsetto and his command of every instrument you can build and his will to communicate pure ecstasy, and he'll challenge you not to surrender.
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With "All the Time," Vivian Girls announced itself as a punk record from the jump, with Ramone talk-singing about a toxic crush in her hypnotizing warble over thrashing guitars, manic drums, and Goodman's falsetto backing vocals.
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Kelly recommended Trent use his falsetto more, which Harry Connick Jr. (crushing hard on the original Idol the whole night, and who can blame him) took as an invitation to squeak into his mic for extra attention.
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Julien Ehrlich's falsetto is singed into every track, the pace slows by a couple beats a minute, and there's the very real sense that Whitney were finding something special in their first attempt at a full-length.
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But he and his collaborators fill the digital spaces with vocals: syncopated flurries in "FYM," undulating pleas in "Rivals" and long-breathed whispers and imploring falsetto declarations in "Tell Me," the album's most leisurely and passionate song.
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Now, Kevin Parker, his Tame Impala bandmate, has taken one of Glamorous Damage's most immediate tracks—"Anesthetized Lesson"—and remixed it, polishing off all the off-beat tweaks and smoothing the falsetto vocals into the new mix.
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On his track "Only Trying 2 Tell U," the young south London artist plumbs the depths of his emotions with smoky melodies, snatches of layered vocals and a wistful tale of heartbreak delivered in a fragile falsetto.
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Fats Domino announced himself with this single: a two-fisted boogie-woogie piano intro with tremolo flourishes, verses that establish his 200-pound physique and his New Orleans locale and a falsetto vocal like a trumpet solo.
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" He compared his audition for "Jersey Boys" to a pornographic tryout in which the all-important "money shot" was his ability to make the sudden vocal jump into a piercing falsetto during "Since I Don't Have You.
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JON CARAMANICA "I just bought a crib on top of the hill," Thundercat proclaims in his familiar falsetto — halfway giddy, halfway dreamy — at the start of "Black Qualls," the first single from an album due in April.
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"Forest Green" is languid and falsetto-filled, "Lyla" has an irrepressible syncopation, and "Hymnostic" is a piano ballad with the type of rich harmonies that Vernon could only have dreamed of writing in his DeYarmond Edison days.
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" Beyond the cheerfully nostalgic, Mario Kart-referencing artwork, the song is frankly a trip, with guest T3 taking his falsetto into ungodly, reverb-swathed heights and Sah himself rapping various outlandish lines, including "I wanna fuck an amphibian.
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That breezy falsetto, which comes in around 0:38, became every hysterical Whatsapp sent to mates in the work toilets the next morning about how, wow, you'd never tried that before but, lmfaooo, how you probably won't again.
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As the world still tries to process the news that Prince is dead, musicians like Aretha Franklin, Mick Jagger and Madonna have done their best to honor the man with the unfettered falsetto and unparalleled influence on music.
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In the context of all that sincerity, The Darkness were seen as a "joke" band—four men from the decidedly uncool town of Lowestoft in Suffolk who favored spandex over leather jackets and falsetto over pained emotional candour.
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"Let Me" is a synthy slow one (complete with finger snaps) which shows off the strong upper part of Zayn's vocal range and falsetto (his greatest strengths, and what made him stand out so much in One Direction).
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For some of them, it will be their first time hearing the weight of anti-Black microaggressions folded into a 21-track package and dropped onto the warm boom-clack of a drum, or feathered through harmonized falsetto.
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"On the way back to the dorms in the middle of the redwood forest, I would sing the soprano line of the choral music for fun in my falsetto voice," Mr. Asawa told The Associated Press in 1999.
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If you had walked into a bar in London in the 80s, for instance, you may have found the sweet falsetto and synth of Bronski Beat gliding beneath a sheet of purple strobe lights and coked-up dancers.
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Her head voice (what sounds like falsetto when women sing) still flutters over thumping, slow-burning "Blue Lights," so packed with harmonies that after one listen it makes me feel full, like I've eaten a sack of marshmallows.
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The Piano & a Microphone version starts off with a jittering jazz piano and a high-up falsetto, but it wanders around over the next five minutes as Prince dips into his lowest register and bounds around the keys.
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I saw a lot of people on Twitter claiming it had Stevie Nicks vibes, but the classic Fleetwood Mac influence here is way more Christine McVie; you can hear it that falsetto and the love of a melodic piano.
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With a unique blend of pop, funk and rock and roll explored over 39 albums, Prince used his signature falsetto to push the cultural conversation forward with lyrics that were both blatantly sexual and a challenge to gender norms.
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Three years have passed, and at Saturday's opening-night performance of his show at the same club, he commemorated the tragedy with a performance of the much more anguished Coldplay song "Fix You," sung in a keening semi-falsetto.
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As with his breakout viral hits "1 Night" and "Minnesota," Lil Yachty's music relies less on technical rapping than on simple melodies that invoke warped nursery rhymes, with bright, bubbly production and an affecting falsetto smoothed with Auto-Tune.
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The Man's surprise smash, with its funky melody and falsetto chorus, hinges on a retro-pop vibe — but it's not shallow catchy, like previous pop-rock crossover hits that quickly grew tired (Fun's "We Are Young" comes to mind).
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The finale "Like My Father" is the apotheosis of both emotional sensitivity and minimalism, as Crush engages in personal dialogue with his father and yearns to "remain in [his] younger days" in a touching duet between falsetto and piano.
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The songs, almost all of which seem to be written from the perspective of women, were built on sinuous guitar lines, moody synths, and his voice, a falsetto that became necessary after he had an operation on his throat.
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"One of the reasons why we chuckle or use air quotes or even a falsetto tone when we say 'A Very Special Episode' is because, of course, these issues are complex and some have long-term implications," Dalton said.
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Dressed in a glowing white suit, Childish Gambino — the musical persona of Donald Glover, who has won Golden Globes and Emmys as an actor — performed "Terrified" as a slithery erotic fantasy fully of falsetto and a gentle funk groove.
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From the twangy, falsetto-laden Big Star allusions of opener "I'll Be There" through the McCartney-like delicacy of "Oh, Clever Boy" up to the playfully simple "Out of the Light," Rault seems to be wide awake and grinning.
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And he has a voice full of eccentric intensity: a baritone croon that he often sustains with a raw, stubborn quaver, and a falsetto that he used, in one song, for a tune he declared was given to him by angels.
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A MINUS Honorable mentions:Sampha: Process (Young Turks) Beyoncé and Drake's go-to angel finds time for his own piano-rooted reflections, which between his unforced falsetto and his electronic atmospherics prove so intimate they're best-suited for headphones—good ones.
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The croak at the bottom of his range gets enough soul through to liven up the EDM balladry in the background, and the tiny jump into falsetto when he sings, "I been quiet/silent for too long" is a nice touch.
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From what I've heard so far, the album deploys Speelburg's usual arsenal: that killer falsetto, playfully arranged guitars and synths and melodies that can evoke Connan Mockasin one moment, and Father John Misty or "The Bay"-era Metronomy the next.
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The song features some of the best elements of Prince's work to date: like "When Doves Cry," it lacks a bass line and sounds better for it; like "When You Were Mine" it's sung in falsetto that works without being distracting.
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The Beatles' non-macho appearance (at the time, their long hair and the falsetto in their songs made them seem womanly) directly led to the frank bisexuality and anti-masculine dress, though hypermasculine behavior, of rock musicians in the '80s.
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If you like Metronomy when Joe Mount was rocking a falsetto all day every day, and you dig Hot Chip's seminial 2006 video for "Over and Over," then you will certainly enjoy the plinkety cool grooves of this London trio.
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Mates would invite me to Jungle Fever raves, or ask me round to their houses to practice MC'ing, but I was quite content staying at home wailing the falsetto bit at the end of "You've Got Everything Now" by The Smiths.
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It occurred a half-hour later, after an onstage interview between the Dope Queens and Ms. Klein and a birthday video with appearances from Ms. Robinson, Carrie Brownstein of "Portlandia" and a male comic who sang to Ms. Williams in falsetto.
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It showcases him flexing the superlative falsetto that we haven't seen enough of as yet on his singles, and exchanging lines of vague innuendo with Swift, who co-wrote the track with hip-hop producer Sam Dew and Jack Antonoff.
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The vocalist came in singing the lyrics, "Angora fur, the Aegean Sea," with such an endearing and vulnerable male falsetto that I wanted to simultaneously hug him, protect him, and sign him – even though I had no idea who he was.
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It was meant to be a happy song—you could tell by its confident insistence on Christ's kingship, by the shuffling major key in which it was played, and by the smiles and falsetto ad-libs it elicited from the crowd.
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Saro channeled those experiences into his recently-released Boy Afraid EP. The work layers stark, seething pop production as a vessel for his quicksilver falsetto, processing experience through cracked defiance and, as on single "Sky Doesn't Blue," breathless sorrow and vulnerability.
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"Cocaine" is the most taut song from his new EP, "Volume 1," that also includes a handful of recent SoundCloud hits, including "Honesty," in which he shows off a falsetto-esque yelp that's as bracing as his regular croon is reassuring.
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Always more daring and credibly soulful than his grunge contemporaries, Mr. Dulli — his vocal arsenal a rasping whisper-scream-falsetto roulette — has grown only more refined as his arrangements have expanded, with strings and horns now cutting the razor-edge guitars.
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More explicit is "We Suck Young Blood," based around a comically despondent piano progression, intentionally flubbed handclap percussion, and a wordless falsetto hook that recalls the sheet-wearing, "I got a rock" variety of ghost instead of more malevolent spirits.
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It all feels both effortlessly catchy and like an intricate puzzle, with Mr. White's voice — a fine subject for another discussion — slipping in and out of falsetto with the same mobility he expressed in other areas of his work with the band.
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There's no shortage of people willing to say that he's a supremely talented guitarist and effortlessly good singer, but hearing three such different tracks pushed up against one another—falsetto soul, dance rock, heavy blues—shows that he can turn on a dime.
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The album opens with desolate, stormy guitar while PJ shouts "Look out ahead, I see danger come / I want a pistol, I want a gun" before her voice rises to a melodic falsetto—you can hear that beauty she was speaking about.
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From Swae Lee's falsetto ad libs, to Jxmmi's claim of being kin to McCartney, to enlisting Gucci Mane for a feature in a year where he's defied all the odds, "Black Beatles" is equally effective when getting dressed or out at a club.
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It's topped off with a healthy amount of twang from the cast, in particular from Damon Daunno, whose Curly is the falsetto-infatuated love child of Western movie staple Roy Rogers and sensitive Swedish songwriter Sondre Lerche, and Rebecca Naomi Jones's wry Laurey.
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The Opera North production carried the subtitle "A Murder Ballad" and featured The Tiger Lillies' frontman, the singer and accordionist Martyn Jacques, growling and warbling (often in his signature falsetto) while the dramatic scenes came to life behind him in a choreographed pantomime.
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I'll put my hands up right now to being one of those Radiohead stans who will earnestly yell about the mellifluous nature of Thom Yorke's falsetto over a pub din and walk away thinking, 'yes, that was a good use of my time.
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The breakout came on 2014's DSU, a record that flickered between Joyce references, gentle pianos, muffled noise, video game funk bass, and a wider vocal range from the singer ("Icehead"'s pitched-up electro-falsetto, for example, is beautiful and absurd).
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Floating, structurally languid R&B and soaring falsetto have become de rigeur for cool kids, blog darlings, and massive pop stars alike: Consider Zayn Malik's high-budget rebranding post-One Direction as a solo artist steeped in Sade and 90s R&B.
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When he hits falsetto notes on songs like "Piss in the Sheets" or "650 On My Toes," it becomes truly sublime, especially as he uses those wild, swooping notes to mock the posers of the world and their whole sense of self-esteem.
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In the aria's heart-rending final moments, he veers from a soft, fragile falsetto to an anguished, booming bass — conjuring in an instant the pain, vulnerability and rage of the powerful King Philip as he realizes that his wife has never loved him.
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The record garnered some attention for them, benefiting from one of the most recognizable 90s emo anthems, "A Picture Postcard," which was previously released on the Falsetto Keeps Time EP (and later covered by Tim Kinsella on The Postmarked Stamp Singles Series).
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Yves' falsetto is distant and drenched in reverb—it sounds like he's singing to a lover walking down a long tunnel—and those blues-y guitar riffs strumming along to a lackadaisical gait conjure the sweet kind of melancholy that the end of summer brings.
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From the giant, gritty riffs that open "Torn Asunder" on Absolution to Pendergast's newly conquered falsetto on the end "From Ruin," this a band that has found its footing, grown together as friends and a band, and developed a powerful sound of their own.
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Riley Knapp and Casey Barth, (see what they did there), create modern, soulful R&B-pop hinged on elastic vocals that can stretch into a perfectly pitched falsetto, pulsating synths, and a production value so clean you could eat your morning eggs off it.
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But Emil Erstrand and Nils Nygårdh have twisted the component parts of their music into something entirely new on their second single from the Love Chamber EP. The brass is soft, the organ is trebleless, and Erstrand's voice now sits most comfortably in its falsetto.
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It's been two years since Love Letters, and five since The English Riviera, the record that really broke Metronomy, pushing Mount from being a bedroom beat maker with a bizarre falsetto to an artist with critical clout and comerical appeal without sacrificing the weird quotient.
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So is "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a song, yet somehow, by dint of shameless alchemy and professional stamina, it coheres; the movie shows poor Roger Taylor doing take after take of the dreaded "Galileo!" shrieks, bravely risking a falsetto-related injury in the cause of art.
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Since last fall we've been casually crushing on rising LA singer Gallant—purveyor of low-lit R&B—fabulous on his own, sure, but now he's applied his dexterous falsetto to this marvelously mellow tune, "Skipping Stones," luring in Jhené Aiko for a sultry duet.
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Belting out, "Don't tell me you agree with me, when I saw you kicking dirt in my eye," with that signature falsetto, now layered with anger and dissension, Jackson's words feel doubly relevant in light of those who lament racism and claim to denounce misogyny.
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All Khalid sees around him is shallowness and duplicity: "No one really means it when they're wishing you well/I got no one to call, no one/and people only love you when they're needing your wealth," he sings in a sweet, sad falsetto.
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And Mr. Lee's objective is to define Jackson as a particular type of artist — a thoughtful, highly conscious perfectionist who never stopped honing his technique, rather than an instinctual physical genius who merely had to walk onstage, pop his hips and let out a falsetto shriek.
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Through wispy guitar lines, eyes-closed falsetto, and the tight thwack of a carefully tuned snare he tells the origin stories of our universe of woe, tapping into the universalities of romantic discontent that have echoed through decades of boogie, funk, R&B, and quiet storm.
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Drifting through Auto-Tuned falsetto and floating through dreamy landscapes of noise, Yachty understands that texture and atmosphere have become some of rap's most important tools and takes these ideas one step further, relishing the prettiness of a modulated "hellooooooo" or a voice melting into a synth.
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Luckily, the Internet got its greasy little hands on it because nothing is sacred, meaning that our ears were blessed with the tinkling piano, dulcet falsetto and smooth-as-fuck synth lines of "Hadron Collider", a hidden gem from the dream team we never knew we needed.
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With his falsetto on fleek over a bed of soulful sumptuousness and a lyric that would melt the hardest heart as he pledges his eternal devotion ("If God one day struck me blind, your beauty I'd still see"), this one will stand until the end of time.
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From the creamy falsetto of "Chamakay" to the dreamy saxophone of "Chosen" and the slick, 80s grooves of "You're Not Good Enough," this was an album which paved the way for a new sort of 2010s pop: polished and retro, but fresh and future-facing, too.
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Their TV debut went to plan: Julien Ehrlich's falsetto carried, Will Miller's trumpet was all high and lonesome, and Max Kakacek's slide solo danced on top of the sweetness, eventually making you realize that you're watching the closest thing our generation will ever get to The Band.
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When he left the group to embark on a solo career, most of us expected that he'd be making the most of that sweet, sweet falsetto, and hoped for an album made up of the sort of R&B slow jamz that would make Usher blush.
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Prince was the first musician who made me understand that you could be many things at once: an impish figure in a tightly cut red matador suit, cooing in a falsetto, then in the same breath one dropping to a velvet baritone while fluttering kohl-rimmed eyelids.
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Inspired by Cale's version, Buckley recorded his own for his 1994 album Grace, and his gentle electric guitar filigrees and unearthly falsetto — at one point he sings the title across 23 seconds — remain the definitive version of the song for many listeners, no doubt bolstered by Buckley's tragic death.
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"Sober" cruises spookily over simulated acoustic drum popping that explodes into rapid snare blasts at the end of each measure, plus spiky keyboards that also sound like drum machines; "Homemade Dynamite" soars and abrades simultaneously thanks to the contrast between her whispered falsetto and the clattery electronic sizzle.
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Here are three things to know about Timberlake's halftime show: The most puzzling thing about Timberlake's performance was its muddy sound, which came to the fore in the opening moments of the performance as Timberlake performed his new song "Filthy," a synthy, gooey mix laced with a falsetto.
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With its stabbing strings and slick falsetto, The Weeknd's lead single "Earned It" could have made a successful Bond film title track, and consequently earned him his first truly global hit, reaching number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and making the top ten in several other countries worldwide.
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But when I watched " Like I Love You," I could imagine myself as the sexy mixed-race girl in low-slung jeans with a back tattoo, straddling Timberlake on the bonnet of a racing car whilst he sang in a falsetto about all the ways he'd love me, given the chance.
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Also, Thundercat (né Stephen Bruner) is playing it so fast that he makes the thing sound like a Metallica guitar solo, but instead of thrash metal, he and his band are pumping out a strange mix of extremely adept jazz, funk and R&B, all of which anchor his silky falsetto.
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RY X is a man known to his fam as Ry Cuming, an itinerant artist (he's called home Costa Rica, Indonesia, Stockholm, London and Berlin), who's been knocking around for a minute writing lithe, soft spun songs that verge on hypnotic hymnals, thanks to his ripping guitar lines and gilded falsetto.
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I do know that "Purple Rain" is a tour de force, Prince's audacious attempt to write the ultimate rock power ballad, just as "Adore" is the ultimate falsetto soul ballad, and "Kiss" is the ultimate bare-bones funk jam, and "1999" is the ultimate apocalyptic party anthem, and so on.
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"That Girl Is You" unfolds from introduction to obsession over a four-chord syncopated guitar riff, with Mr. Matthews playing nearly every part in the studio, yet there's an improvisational volatility to his voice — breathy and cagey, then rounded and courteous, then agitated and scratchy, then shrieking in wild-eyed falsetto.
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CARAMANICA The upbeat, psychedelic surf-rock foundation of "Sundress" — stomping drums, effects-laden chords — comes from Tame Impala's 2010 song "Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind," and ASAP Rocky and his collaborators (among them Danger Mouse) add falsetto oohs and ahs to point it back toward the Beach Boys.
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JOE COSCARELLI The 25-year-old singer Gallant is facing off against a pair of vocal heavyweights — Beyoncé and Rihanna — in the urban contemporary album category, thanks to his full-length debut, "Ology," which showcases his knack for writing acrobatic melodies that serve as vehicles for his lean and buttery falsetto.
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Also on the bill are the band Whitney — two former members of the Smith Westerns, sharing falsetto-voiced self-doubt in rootsy indie-rock — and Woods, which arrived in 2005 as Jeremy Earl's one-man indie band, but has added a rhythm section, horns and hints of psychedelia and Ethiopian funk.
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But first he had to perform, and for two of his five songs, he veered dramatically from his set list to pay homage to the history-making moment: He delivered the Marty Robbins classic "Devil Woman" – with a surprising touch of falsetto – in honor of his grandfather, who was seated in the audience.
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Alicia Keys, 'How Come You Don't Call Me' Included as the non-album B-side to a little 1982 single you may know called "1999" and originally called "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore" per the Prince style guide, this song was a perfect showcase for Prince's falsetto and piano playing.
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Capping his commencement speech during a ceremony on Friday, the comedian sang the iconic "I Will Always Love You" (made popular by Houston thanks to 1992's The Bodyguard, but before that by Dolly Parton, who wrote the song), but with more of a lighter, falsetto that earned a ton of laughs.
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His cadence and lazy falsetto, while obviously not as refined as the singer's, took more from the sly braggadocio of a Curtis Mayfield (whose Superfly album featured him matter-of-factly serenading about ghetto life and having bad bitches in his bed in the early 70s) than it did any of his contemporaries.
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But you still haven't gotten into Radiohead, probably because you think you missed the boat, and the only version of them you've heard is Thom Yorke's weeping falsetto sandwiched between Muse and Coldplay on alt-rock radio while driving to work (two bands which, by the way, would not exist without Radiohead).
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Julius McMichael's spectral falsetto lead on the Paragons' "Florence" casts us off the shore of the speculative present and maroons us in a pillowy intertime, all velvet and sateen and crushed corsages on the scarred basketball dance floor, a ballad that keeps falling into dirge cadence, hovering between the aurora borealis and the void.
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Though information around regarding the Paul brothers is scant, it's fairly easy to draw a line connecting, say, the woozy yet tight bass in D'Angelo's "Chicken Grease" with the wobbling production in "Jasmine," the lonely falsetto on Prince's downbeat debut album tracks, the pop sensibility of Michael Jackson, and the production glitchiness of J Dilla.
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The falsetto vocals, devotional lyrics, and classic combination of strings, horn, organ, and sitar on "Adore" aren't just elements that a '60s-style Philadelphia soul ballad might happen to include; they're the very substance of a Philadelphia soul ballad (according to those who perform acts of genre assignment), the specific attributes that equal the genre.
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Those experiences, along with the schooling he received growing up in a particularly musical household, all feed into Language's standout tracks like the cosmic slow jam "Can I Come Over?" which uses Cook's breathy falsetto and tensile guitar leads as the background for a moving meditation on human relation in the era of pocket supercomputing.
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A shirtless Gambino mounted the stage rocking silver trousers and an IRL falsetto that I think most of us assumed had been achieved via studio effects, against a light grid backdrop that kind of reminds me of what we thought "the future" might be like in 1999 and/or the inside of Prince's house.
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In what may be the show's most inspired musical moment thus far, Paper Boi and his stoner-mystic sidekick Darius sing along in falsetto to the 1983 R&B hit "Encore," by Cheryl Lynn — a song "their mom probably played for them," Mr. Udeorji said — in a parking lot ahead of a drug deal.
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The mandate is to keep thickening the mix, loading on the irritants and cranking them up: the way sweet falsetto "oohs" arrive with vicious feedback at 1:25, and the way the chorus is chanted for the final minute and a half over implacable drums and a massive pileup of lead and rhythm guitars.
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This sparser version is lacking a lot of the embellishments that made the original magical, but the earnest paranoia of "Karma Police" fits into the politicized, slightly traditional-leaning M.O. that Vic has adopted over the past few years, so it's a good fit for him, especially when he impressively emulates the original's famous, crowd-lifting falsetto coda.
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His first three albums rendered dueling portraits of the California-born artist, though they all shared a willful embrace for the senses—in his satin-soft falsetto, he sang of unlocking pleasure through taste and touch (from the thrust of "Use Me" and "How Many Drinks?" on Kaleidoscope Dream to the savory mischief of Wildheart's "Coffee").
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Oh No fits right at home in the new wave revival of today, but rather than settle for being a Stranger Things-style cut-and-paste of 80s pop tropes, Lanza absorbs the best of the era into a style of electropop that's all her own, her soft, angelic falsetto like a silk ribbon to her incredible production gifts.
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It's a malady typified by "Feel It Still," the radio hit: sly bass, eerie bursts of horn, and a playful, descending guitar loop attach to a melody that would be sublime if John Gourley sang it an octave or two lower, in his natural register, rather than affecting a breathy falsetto in an awkward attempt at arch cool.
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"Can't Believe the Way We Flow" glides over a looped, high-pitched vocal sample and countless runny keyboard layers, as Blake's falsetto projects a sense of surprised elation, but he can't stop fussing: halfway through, the beat drops out, the sample changes tempo, and this break lasts until the very end of the song, when the original beat reappears.
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"We Go Home Together," the album's first single, was a collaboration with James Blake that stretched Blake's voice to it's pained limits, either at the highest end of his falsetto or the fractured extent of a wail; what starts out as a plaintive organ in the mix turns into an anguished circus nightmare by the end.
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Mr. Vernon's singing is more wide-ranging here than ever before — the opening of "715 — Creeks" has echoes of Frank Ocean's deadpan soul; on "21 Moon Water," Mr. Vernon's falsetto slides into New Age territory; "8 (circle)" owes a debt to Mr. Hornsby, and on "____45_____," Mr. Vernon is a bluesman, deploying perhaps his most direct singing here.
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Along with Knowles's lithe falsetto, they've added the creamy, curvy tones of JONES and like all the best videos, this one elevates the track by being perfectly bizarre—featuring a plethora of bendy bodies, falling from the sky and tangling with one another, like a bunch of helium injected blow up sex dolls popped and plummeting… and bouncing off a giant woman.
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And that's the case with this new Moses Sumney video for his recent single "Rank & File," off this year's Black in Deep Red, 2014 EP. Sumney is… I mean, whew, Sumney is so good a singer that listening to his falsetto can make your skin tingle as though you've added a really high-concentration alpha-hydroxy acid to your skincare routine.
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He no doubt picked up a thing for two in that department from his early heroes like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, paying tribute to the years "when rock was young" on the nostalgic "Crocodile Rock" while emulating the style of that era, busting out his best falsetto and miraculously cramming every single syllable of "crocodile rocking" into the chorus.
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" Or that he can note that Sondheim and Bernstein's "Tonight" from "West Side Story" performs the same musical-dramatic function as the Act 1 finale of Puccini's "La Bohème," in which the doomed lovers "float operatically in falsetto and head voice" to "an otherworldly vocal region that perfectly represents the only place where Tony and Maria could ever be together.
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Like all of their albums, Lytle's songs carefully balance the beautiful with the bizarre, returning to the band's endearing signatures—the quirky electronic squibs, the chunky, fuzzed out power chords, the wistful piano riffs, and a plethora of hooks delivered by Lytle's unmistakably vulnerable falsetto—that thrive with a newfound blitheness that came from a pressure-free environment back home in Modesto.
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The excellent Hard II Love retains Usher's genre-futzing wanderlust—check the sinister synths on the Young Thug collaboration "No Limit"—but also finds him happily showing off his pure pop-soul prowess: "Missin U" has a horn-borne, Steely Dan-swiping chorus that's pure '20143s AM gold, while the falsetto come-ons and cascading melodies of "Crash" would have fit right in on Confessions.
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The excellent Hard II Love retains Usher's genre-futzing wanderlust—check the sinister synths on the Young Thug collaboration "No Limit"—but also finds him happily showing off his pure pop-soul prowess: "Missin U" has a horn-borne, Steely Dan-swiping chorus that's pure '70s AM gold, while the falsetto come-ons and cascading melodies of "Crash" would have fit right in on Confessions.
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True to the signature soulful sound he crafted with his debut album — 2014's critically and commercially adored In the Lonely Hour — "Goodbyes" makes use of Smith's emotional breadth ("So I'm never gonna get to close to you, even when I mean the most to you, in case you go and leave me in the dirt," he sings of a doomed lover) and unmistakable falsetto.
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But where her malleable falsetto was previously buried low in the mix, it's at the forefront here on the skittering, four-on-the floor "VV Violence" and the slow-burning "I Talk BB"—a final touch necessary for making the everyday otherworldly—Max Mertens Brooklyn-based composer Julianna Barwick has spent the better part of the last decade reaching for the sky, twisting layer after layer of her own voice into cumulonimbus-light meditations.
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Some gamely tried: Luke James, whose falsetto on "Do Me, Baby" attracted the first lusty shrieks of the night, and Bilal, the most impressive male singer here not named Stevie, who woke up three-quarters of the way through "The Beautiful Ones" and kept putting his limber voice to work through "If I Was Your Girlfriend" (though his performance couldn't hold a candle to his riveting Prince tribute at the BET Awards in June).
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He makes his big statement with "Castle on the Hill," a tale of childhood nostalgia whose chiming U2 chords and Sheeran's wailing, inarticulate, Bono-style falsetto rouse adequately until the quiet bridge, after which he revs back up into the cathartic chorus, bellowing "I still remember these old country lanes/when we did not KNOW THE ANSWERS," pumping a metaphorical fist to congratulate himself on the romance of his youthful confusion and innocence.
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The EP, though only four tracks spread across 15 minutes, packs a remarkably coherent vision of the project's sound, touching on classic country themes ranging from the lover's lament ("Pharaoh," for which we're premiering at the Angus Borsos-directed video at the top of the page); to the half-time shuffle recalling the early days of Fussell's relationship with his now-wife ("SOFR"); and a sky reaching falsetto backed by a pedal steel guitar played to perfection ("Secret").
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He gyrates over to where a young Italian woman is sitting and uses his wiggle to seduce her to dance with him, which they do until he tires of that and moves on to the chic, old French woman who came with the Italian, then over to Marianne and Paul (who's both skeptical of and seduced by Harry), then around the room, then out into the sunlight, his mouth moving in loose tandem with Mick Jagger's falsetto.
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