Ghost vocals: The mysterious nuance of the analogue age
There’s a moment when you spill out of a live gig, where people are understandably quick to share praise. That’s, of course, the best part, right? Riding high on euphoria, remembering the brief moments of brilliance that made you feel alive. But I always flinch when this line is uttered by excited fans: “It sounded just like it did on the record!”, which, to my mind, is a complete misunderstanding of the show.
The recorded music is there to largely represent a more polished version of the product. A good live show should deviate from that, embrace spontaneity, improvisation and imperfection. I want to know I am in the presence of a once-in-a-lifetime experience, not to be replicated when I get home and flick the record on.
So many of my favourite artists extend songs into lengthy groove breakdowns or add subtle harmonies that may not have been obvious at the time of recording. They’re nuggets of brilliance that I want to experience again, but can’t, because they were fleeting moments of artistic reality. And that is what drives me back to the next show.
But the closest I come to feeling that in recorded music is the use of an ad-lib. Done well, it ignites that same feeling of fervent excitement in my listening because it reminds me exactly why I was drawn to music in the first place—that primal response to the sound of something good.
Traditionally, it’s an art form hip-hop has seemed to master, with rappers maintaining their cadence through spontaneous utterance of syllables in between verses. But my memories of the greatest vocal ad-libs often come back to Anthony Kiedis, who would wilfully throw in a ‘woo’ or ‘oh!’ whenever Flea would conjure up a bass lick that couldn’t be ignored. By vocally responding to such brilliance, Kiedis effectively invited me, the listener, to lose myself for the next three minutes.
The point is that these vocal ad-libs are a natural response to the music. So when musicians are in the studio, laying down what was meant to be instrumental-only tracks, sometimes the feel is so good that they can’t help but verbalise it. This is what has led to ‘ghost vocals’ in the age of analogue recording.
Take The Rolling Stones’ major hit ‘Angie’ as an example. At the end of the first verse, when Jagger, on lead vocals, sings, “Let me whisper in your ear / Angie, Angie”, a faint ad-lib of “oh” over the acoustic guitar melody can be heard in the left channel of the recording.
This voice is indeed Jagger, but not the lead vocal he intended on laying down. Instead, it was merely a placeholding vocal performance he delivered when the rest of the band were laying down their instrumental parts. But without digital enhancing and the ability to remove blemishes, it has remained in the finished recording and can forever be faintly heard.
It can also be heard on several classic tracks from the vault, including songs by The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. It’s a sprinkling of magic that only analogue recording can facilitate and gives recorded songs that inherently human feel. The sort of feel that makes live gigs so special, and so unrepeatable.
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