John Lennon
Vocal style

The British critic Nik Cohn observed of Lennon, "He owned one of the best pop voices ever, rasped and smashed and brooding, always fierce." Cohn wrote that Lennon, performing " Twist and Shout ", would "rant his way into total incoherence, half rupture himself." When the Beatles recorded the song, the final track during the mammoth one-day session that produced the band's 1963 debut album, Please Please Me, Lennon's voice, already compromised by a cold, came close to giving out. Lennon said, "I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming." In the words of biographer Barry Miles, "Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock 'n' roll." The Beatles' producer, George Martin, tells how Lennon "had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me: 'DO something with my voice!... put something on it... Make it different. ' " Martin obliged, often using double-tracking and other techniques.

As his Beatles era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes of Lennon "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of ' Cold Turkey ' and the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band." Music critic Robert Christgau called this Lennon's "greatest vocal performance... from scream to whine, is modulated electronically... echoed, filtered, and double tracked." David Stuart Ryan described Lennon's vocal delivery as ranging from "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style. Wiener too described contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair". Music historian Ben Urish recalled hearing the Beatles' Ed Sullivan Show performance of " This Boy " played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."
keywords:letter_frequency, startend:quotation, change_case:english_capital