The one singer Eddie Vedder said was impossible to describe
The entire vocal range of Eddie Vedder has been explained far too many times.
There’s no doubt that he’s a fantastic vocalist when he’s going for it, but that hasn’t helped people like Creed or Puddle of Mudd from sounding absolutely insufferable whenever they try to copy his style. A lot of classic rock is baked into his vocal cords, but there are many pieces of the rock and roll underground that paved the way for him being the frontman that he turned into circa 1991.
If you think about that signature yowl that he has, though, there’s a lot of echoes from the likes of Paul Rodgers from Bad Company in his delivery. Not everyone was used to hearing such a thick baritone in a genre that focused primarily on screamers, but when he opened his mouth on tunes like ‘Alive’, there’s a lot of soul in his delivery that goes much further than any hair metal screecher could ever hope to go in their lives.
That’s because Vedder always focused on the individuality of the voice rather than the technical ability all the time. Everyone from Robert Plant to Roger Daltrey deserved the highest praise imaginable in his books, but there were a lot of people who were like Bob Dylan that earned massive points for having the right tone of voice whenever they sang their songs, even if they didn’t exactly sound like they were ready for primetime.
And somewhere in the middle of range and expression stood REM. While they were far from the most ambitious band in the world when they started out, their journey from one of the biggest indie artists in the world to one of the biggest stadium acts in alternative rock history wasn’t down to one killer single. It came from those willing to listen to every single word that Michael Stipe sang.
He wasn’t looking to preach like so many other artists that came before him, but listening to everything from ‘Radio Free Europe’ to ‘Man on the Moon’ to ‘Losing My Religion’, you could always feel the emotion in his voice even if you knew none of the words. Vedder would be the first to admit that he often had no idea what Stipe was going on about, but that didn’t matter so long as he felt it in his heart first.
Murmur may have still been an underground phenomenon when the Pearl Jam frontman first discovered it, but he already knew what Stipe was doing was on another level, saying, “There are a couple of things I need to address, the first being Michael Stipe. How do you explain the dialogue between Michael and the listener? Such wisdom in those songs that it made us discover things that we knew were inside of us. And I can say that there are things that I feel very deeply about inside [my heart] that Michael Stipe put there himself.”
That might sound insane coming from an artist that was borderline incomprehensible on his first few records, but Stipe’s power is something that really needs to be heard to be believed. A song like ‘Perfect Circle’ has a lyric sheet that doesn’t really make the most sense when looking at the words on paper, but when paired with that beautiful guitar line from Peter Buck, Stipe was practically wearing every single emotion he had ever felt on his sleeve for those few minutes.
And when listening to every grunge band that admired REM from Nirvana to Pearl Jam, all of them held onto the same belief of music being able to transcend a bunch of instruments if there was a singer that meant everything they said. Not every line was a poetic masterpiece, but what defines good poetry can often be what could be done with the written word, and someone being able to perform such abstract turns of phrase and still feel heartfelt is what most people should be striving for.
