The pop singer who sang like an angel, according to Slash: “The perfect vocal”
Slash never bothered limiting himself to strictly one genre. There’s no denying that he’s still one of the biggest figures in rock and roll, but his ability to work with virtually anybody has been what’s steered him through the wildest experiments of his career, whether that’s working with Michael Jackson, performing with Carol King, or appearing onstage at the Oscars with Ryan Gosling. His first love was still always rock, but Slash thought there was something special whenever Adam Levine opened his mouth.
Which is strange, considering the kind of dismal reception that Maroon 5 has gotten over the years. After years of being the watered-down version of what a power pop act should be, something interesting happened the minute they released ‘Moves Like Jagger’. They may have been singling out a famous rock musician in the title, but every part of rock was scrubbed from their DNA.
Then again, were they ever even a rock band to begin with? There are definitely some fierce guitars on their first handful of albums on tracks like ‘Harder to Breathe’, but outside of a handful of Beatles covers, a lot of their tunes tend to come from the world of R&B and old-school pop rather than trying to give Led Zeppelin a run for their money.
When Slash started work on his solo album, though, he needed a vast array of singers working with him. Many of his riffs tended to follow the same formula, but sometimes when you have something delicate, you need someone with just the right amount of emotion to bring it across, and for the guitarist, Levine was a no-brainer.
Despite his reliance on enhanced effects on some of the group’s later material, Slash was knocked out by the vocalist’s raw chops when performing the song ‘Gotten’, saying, “I went to his house, and he actually liked it a lot, and he wrote the perfect vocal for it. He sings like an angel on it, and it doesn’t sound like Maroon 5, but you can tell it’s his voice. I think people will really appreciate the way it sounds.”
Even though fans of Maroon 5 were slowly going to be getting songs like ‘Payphone’ in the near future, it’s refreshing to hear Levine’s voice with nothing else to hide behind. Slash’s guitar is still the star of the show, but Levine managed to bring his A-game and come through with a vocal that feels halfway between Prince’s softer voice and the kind of sentimental balladry that came out of Stevie Wonder’s later catalogue.
This collaboration probably opened the door for Levine to take some more chances later down the road. During a memorial concert following Chris Cornell’s passing, Levine would show up to perform a stellar version of the song ‘Seasons’, where he managed to match Cornell’s more acrobatic vocals nearly note for note.
If anything, this kind of song helped many listeners appreciate Levine more for his musicianship than anything that Maroon 5 has made in the past decade. In a world where his main outfit insists on making songs like ‘Sugar’ and ‘Animals’ for the pop market, where is the guy that showed up on this song these days?
