The artist Phil Collins said “no one else” could copy
Phil Collins had spent his entire recording career trying to push the boundaries of what he could do with rock and roll.
Not everyone may have been interested in his solo career and his attempts to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world, but when listening to every Genesis project, each of them felt like a new creative development and a chance to try things that he had never attempted before. He was always a creative journeyman in many respects, so he knew he had a musical colleague when he saw someone on that same musical wavelength.
But it’s not like Collins’s approach to becoming one of the most well-rounded musicians didn’t come without a few kickbacks. It’s nice to know that someone would want to help out as many people as possible but when every other face on MTV seemed to have something to do with Collins at some point, it’s not hard to see why fatigue would be starting to set in around the tenth time that ‘Sussudio’ came on the airwaves.
When Collins was behind the board, though, he was far easier to digest. Not everything that he made was absolutely phenomenal or anything, but the fact that he was able to bring Eric Clapton to the top of the charts was at least a little bit commendable if it meant getting tunes like ‘Forever Man’. He may have been a drummer for ‘Slowhand’, but Collins knew he was more than the guy who banged things in odd time signatures.
He wanted to create massive productions just like his musical heroes, and that came down to everything from how the drums sounded to how the melody moved whenever working on his solo records like Both Sides. And while he may have had a similar range to Peter Gabriel when he was in the group, he wanted to take a lot better care of his voice when he saw what people like David Crosby could do.
Crosby had already had an education from musical gods as one of The Byrds, but with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, he created the kind of musical symphonies that most people didn’t realise was possible with only three voices. Once Collins delved into Crosby’s solo catalogue, he saw the real genius that was at work whenever he started to arrange the right vocal lines together on If I Could Only Remember My Name.
The album itself isn’t exactly radio-friendly all the time, but that hardly mattered to Collins when listening to the deep cuts, saying, “‘Music is Love’ and ‘Orleans’ and all this stuff, this vocal stuff is what I loved about him. You really could tell when he was arranging the vocals; it was always very different; he threw in all the stuff that no one else thought about.” But there’s something more sophisticated going on than simply getting every single vocal line to sound damn-near perfect.
Crosby had spent much of his life listening to many different pieces of music, and while rock and roll was definitely a core piece of his diet, hearing everything from Joni Mitchell to Miles Davis helped him develop a taste for strange harmony that wouldn’t have necessarily shown up on a Rolling Stones record.
And since Collins had already started to branch out in fusion projects like Brand X, this kind of approach to vocals was wildly exciting. There had been countless rock and roll frontmen who took the route of becoming a bluesy vocalist, but Crosby was always more interested in looking at the voice as another instrument in the band rather than something that floats on top of the music.
