The artist Freddie Mercury always wanted to sing like: “It’s just effortless”
It’s hard to think of someone like Freddie Mercury having to struggle to sing every time he got up in the morning. Compared to mere mortals who try to put time and effort into making their voice sound like one of the greatest in the world, Mercury seemed to hold the audience in the palm of his hand whilst being an incredible singer, almost as if he was trying to sing opera and run a marathon every time he took the stage. Mercury was always more humble about his gifts, and he contested that everything he looked for in a singer came from Aretha Franklin.
As opposed to Queen’s operatic form of singing, comparing Mercury to Franklin is like comparing apples and industrial-sized tanks. Mercury was certainly excellent at what he did, but Franklin’s voice had a power that didn’t seem human. Whenever she sang a song like ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman’, you believed every word because of just how hard she could belt it.
It’s not like Mercury couldn’t belt when he wanted to. His entire career was indebted to the power of his higher register, but the power he had in most ranges was amazing, hitting those kinds of guttural lows as well as reaching into the stratosphere like on the final breakdown of ‘Under Pressure’.
Although Mercury could do a lot of things with his voice, nowhere was Franklin more evident in his style than on ‘Somebody to Love’. The entire premise of the piece was to create a gospel-style opening and pair it with a great pop song, so hearing Franklin do those insane melismatic slides down gospel scales feels like he’s in a hot church building instead of a proper English recording studio.
Despite Mercury’s ability to channel his music into different styles, he admitted that he was jealous of Franklin’s contribution, saying, “Aretha Franklin’s phrasing is just wonderful. I wish I could sing like her. It’s just so effortless. She just sings like a dream; she doesn’t really have to think about it…I can tell just by listening to her records that she goes in there, and it’s just effortless.”
While, yes, it’s easy to see the effort that Mercury puts into his phrasing compared to Franklin, his greatest strength is never being tied down to any one genre. Franklin has still yet to be topped in terms of raw power when she was singing any genre, but Mercury was about taking his music wherever he fancied, depending on what the song needed.
Songs like ‘You’re My Best Friend’ might be pure pop balladry, but his ability to go from that to blistering hard rock on ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, operatic sections on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and even the odd show tune mixed in like ‘Lazing On a Sunday Afternoon’ is the work of a mad genius putting his voice through the wringer just to see what works for him. Mercury could have shown most aspiring singers a thing or two about how to use one’s voice as an instrument, but in terms of pure precision, Franklin was the equivalent of a vocal hurricane.