The “world’s best” singer Ian Anderson knew deserved better
Ian Anderson lived for change every time he worked with Jethro Tull.
He didn’t like the idea of working with one set of musicians playing the same thing for the rest of his life, and even up until his most recent performances, he’s not trying to perform the same way that he did back when Aqualung was first released. He’s giving the people the version of himself that exists in the modern age, and while that might be disappointing for some people, Anderson didn’t want to be lying to people every time he got onstage.
While many artists try to preserve their voice over the years, the best musicians of their time are the ones who know how to adapt their voice to where they are at the moment. Bob Dylan never claimed to sing the same way that he did back in the 1960s, and even though every uninteresting music critic will talk about how Paul McCartney has lost his voice in recent years, it’s all about how he uses it in the modern age that makes it all the more interesting to listen to him.
But that’s not what the public always wants to see. Any of those big-ticket concert tours is made so that people can relive their glory days, and no one would want to hear their favourite artists look like a shadow of themselves whenever they perform. If anything, Anderson was doing everyone a favour by shattering their illusions of what to expect, because there are more than a few people who never got the picture.
At the same time, it’s never up to the public to tell a musician when to pack it in. It’s a tough call for anyone to decide when it’s time to stop singing for the final time or when to officially put the guitar down, and all that musicians can hope to do is give their best to whatever they were working on. But that doesn’t seem to work as well when it comes to genres of music that aren’t pop and rock.
The classical world has no shortage of great singers, and if you’ve been able to sing like an angel during your peak years, you’re going to be asked to do that same thing night after night. That all seemed to come easy for someone like Pavarotti, but by the end of his career, Anderson couldn’t help but feel sad at how much that immaculate tenor voice had fallen over time.
He didn’t want to say that he was a poor singer by any means, but what Anderson heard was someone that was trying to sing at their peak when they were way past their prime, saying, “The folks who really have the really hard job are people like Pavarotti, who in the last 12 to 15 years of his life he wasn’t really able to sing that way any more. But people expected that. And so he was struggling from then on to deliver the goods. We’re talking about the world’s best-loved and best-known classical opera singer. And he had to go out in that rather sad and awful way.”
It’s not like Pavarotti needed to prove anything to anyone at that point, either. His voice had been etched in stone as one of the greatest singular voices in musical history, but after so many years of being on top of the world, there tends to be a few people that get more than a little bit jaded at their competition and try to recapture the same kind of fire that they had when they were younger.
Bless their hearts for trying it, but Anderson would prefer musicians who have a bit more integrity to the way that they sing at whatever point in their life they are. They certainly aren’t going to have the same sensibilities that they had when they were at the top of their game or anything, but when you look at the biggest singers from decades before that are still going, the best ones are those that are giving their audience their most authentic selves.
