The vocalist George Michael struggled to sing with: “The real challenge”
Most people looking to get into pop music would kill for the kind of chops that George Michael had in his prime.
All of those years listening to everyone from The Beatles to Stevie Wonder came out in every single song he wrote, and while not everything was a smash hit, it’s hard to even think about keeping up the kind of track record that he did. But even with the voice of an angel, Michael knew that there were a handful of artists who could leave even the most seasoned veterans shaking.
If you look at the pop music of the day, though, not every artist had to sound the same when they stepped up tto he microphone. There was a certain rasp that made Rod Stewart undeniable in the 1970s, and while the charts had begun to pivot towards artists like Whitney Houston on the charts, it was just as easy for more unique vocalists like Ozzy Osbourne to find a place on the hit parade, even if half of the press were focused on his image rather than his music.
Of all the rock artists that Michael idolised, like Freddie Mercury and Elton John, a lot of his records have a far stronger R&B influence half the time. He was more than happy to talk about how Lennon and McCartney influenced songs like ‘Heal the Pain’, but when you go all the way back to ‘Careless Whisper’, you could easily hear one of the biggest names in Motown singing that tune as opposed to a glamorous teenybopper act.
Michael was always destined to be more than what his kid band had to offer, but if Faith was the jumping off point, working with some of his heroes was like trial by fire. Anyone would have been absolutely petrified to sing a song like ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’ with Elton John, but even if Michael was born for that tune, collaborating with Aretha Franklin was a different story.
When working with the soul icon for the first time, Michael knew nothing could get in the way of Franklin’s voice, saying, “Aretha was really great to work with, though I probably didn’t get much more of an idea of who she is as a person any more than you have. I just wanted to be a singer; I didn’t want to write or produce. But I was asked to do both. I just wanted to sing with her and see if I could stand up to it. But the real challenge was to make sure I didn’t sound competitive in a situation like that.”
And it’s not like it would have been a fair fight if it were a competition, either. Franklin had pretty much invented the modern idea of what R&B singing could all the way back on ‘Respect’, and even if there were other artists that came later with a lot more precision like Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston, even they managed to bow in reverence to one of the queens of the genre whenever she sang.
Even if Michael didn’t like the idea of putting his voice next to Franklin, he did seem to be taking notes when he was working with her. This was 1986, right before his own solo career blew up, and while Faith shows many different facets of Michael’s vocal range, it’s hard to think of a song like ‘One More Try’ or ‘Kissing A Fool’ without him trying to capture the same kind of magic he heard whenever Franklin sang.
Although Michael did carve himself a place in pop history when working on his own, the fact that he didn’t want to step to Franklin’s pedigree should be a warning to any other vocalist. There’s a lot more ground that the pop spectrum can cover in terms of vocal range, but if you ever think that you’re going to compete with one of the godmothers of soul, you’re going to lose EVERY SINGLE TIME.
