[strandinthewind]

Carne - I agree Stevie's voice is limited by its own nature (perhaps self-imposed) in Illume. In fact and although I like the song, I will never get why she chose to sing it like that, when IMO she could have and should have branched out a little more. I think it would have made the IMO beautiful imagery of the song more compelling.

But, I submit the vocal on "Smile at You" is the superior vocal on the record from an academic standpoint (I am not discussing the relevance or quality of the song). In it, she goes into two octaves and nails it. Thrown Down probably is the second. Her voice literally floats in most of that song.

Nothing LB does on SYW approaches that vocally. Rather, LB's vocals are mostly heavily produced in that he likes to distort the human voice with a filter, etc. Not that there is anything wrong with that, in fact he is very clever and effective at doing it, esp. considering singing, although he certainly can sing, is not his strongest suit (no slam - even he admits Stevie's got a great voice). In fact, my only problem with that process is it can be difficult to reproduce live a la PK. But, anyone at the PBS Soundstage taping will readily tell you, although it was considerably pared down compared to the album cut, "Murrow" translated incredibly well. There just weren't 10 or so gimmicky vocal noises and words floating around like on the record.