Jons change in voice since the 90's........

I guess my ears decieve me, it was probably because he was finding it so hard to hit the notes.

The song I find hard to listen too live nowadays is KTF. It just sounds awful IMO.

100% agree

thts onl because we are conscious of better though!!

what a shame though i know he can sing it correctly, im 100% sure. but he needs to preserve that voice due to its fragile state due to smoking etc....

some studio songs have good vocals, ok not TD standard but im sure you will agree that at least 1 sng from ever album can showcase jons ability to sing, and still be acclaimed as one of the best 'vocalists' rock has seen!

but his whole attitude is wrong, the rest of the band thrive for the live stage, especially richie as seen in the recent bonus DVD, yet he seems restrained during studio time. but let him loose n the stage and hes as good as he has ever been. that man is a GOD!

jon though is on the other end of the scale these days it seems he thrives more off stage with business, meetings and being the 'CEO of a major enterprise' (personally when i type this i feel sick, what a ****in loser. doesnt he remember the past 20 years when he would pay to play in a phone box, now he expects the fans to TOUR to him on his TOUR and pay £200+ for a half arsed concert where 50% of the crowd arent jovi fans and sipping champagne.

jon really is making the workin man work these days... sorry for the pun but hes one giant arse and need to wake up. he has all the money he needs, why cant he help the fans for once???

Superb thread. I really bloody wish someone would ask Jon about this. He does so many interviews I wonder if people are told not to mention it.

There is no way that the smoking alone is the reason his voice has degraded so much when it ought to still be strong in his 40s. Bono has smoked for years and has kept most of his range. Steven Tyler on a good night can still sing Dream On exactly like the record and he has abused his whole body infinitely more than Jon ever has his voice. And Steven is in his 60s. Ronnie James Dio is nearly 70 and still sings the whole of Heaven and hell in the same key and sounds bloody good. Ozzy is still ok. Springsteen is a ****ing machine at 60, still doing 3 and a half hour shows and on good nights nailing loads of stuff. After not singing almost at all for 8 years, Axl Rose came back in 2001-2002 with an an even bigger range but absolutely no depth or power but by 2007 was sining everything from Jungle to Nightrain to Don't Cry better than the vast majority of early 90s shows. I can only imagine how jealous Jon felt when he listened to Chinese Democracy and heard Axl singing like an absolute demon in about 15 completely different voices.

(Incidentally has Jon ever commented on Chinese Democracy?)

I think the main problem with Jon's voice is that whilst it used to be extremely good (voice, not commenting on singing) up until '96, it was never a robust voice. His voice was always naturally clean, high and relatively thin compared to e.g. Axl, Tyler, Dio, Springsteen who all have layers of growl, huskiness, roughness etc which they can manipulate. On top of that i've never heard Jon mention singing lessons and it's quite likely that he simply misused his head and chest voice in the 80s on those mammoth tours, screeching Runaway every night and doing permamnent damage, exacerbated a decade later by smoking.

There's no doubt that Axl Rose damaged his voice and was seemingly left with a lot of weak range but working with Sebastian Bach's voice coach he has gotten all of it back. Check him out on Bach's 2008 track 'Stuck Inside'. His singing and absolutely insanely high and hard and rough banshee scream at the end is better than anything he did in the old days.

Jon, I don't think, has much left to work with, and as much as he seems to have tried in the last few years to improve, I dread to think what 'These Days' is gonna sound like in 5 years time.

Here are some comments I made about Jon and Springsteen on another board:

Does Jon have a particularly good technique for singing? It can't be the smoking on it's own. I'm no vocal expert (I can sing a bit but I'm no Pavarotti and have no clue what notes or tone I'm using) but I think Jon forces the songs out a bit now. Smoking doesn't **** up your voice that badly most of the time. Paul McCartney smoked for decades and he can still go onstage and sing Helter Skelter, which is insanely high. Jon's got to have done something else. I would say heavy touring schedule, but he wasn't gigging that regularly between These Days and Crush or stretching his voice much.

Maybe there's a medical reason, strained his throat in some way?

I really do think the 80's and 90's screeching has damaged it ... a lot.

^^This is a fantastic thread. The band should read this.

So many other people are in denial about Jon's voice; it's nice to see people discuss it openly here.

Any way that we could ask this question from the man himself? It seems to be a taboo subject, I would love to know exactly what's going on...

You know, I may have very biased ears, but the performance of never say goodbye acoustic that I got in Calgary of 2007 was pretty damn close to something that couldve been performed 20 years ago. There's huge passion and amazing vocals in the song.

Since I'm on my itouch, I can't post a link, but just search "never say goodbye Calgary" on YouTube and it should be your first link. The video quality is really bad, but the sound is good enough to hear it.

Edit: this should work:

I think it really depends on the song. Some of us (e.g. Seb) were commenting last tour how Jon really sang Always better than how he did in 1996; in many cases his voice sounded a lot fuller on the high notes. For instance, I'll also take Hey God from Barcelona or Hamburg over the way he sings it on the Crossroads-TD tour. And These Days from Frankfurt is the best rendition I've ever seen him do; I'm sure there were shows from the 96 tour that had a better version, but the ones from that era you can find on youtube, his voice sounds like powerless and thin at best, like a shrieking cat at worst. He was amazing at Frankfurt:


Now granted, the subsequent times he sang this song on that leg of the tour didn't come close to this. I think the MSG shows were more the result of him getting lazy than his voice getting fried, cause he started half-assing Always by the time they got to London... but he also blew I Believe out of the water. Ditto for Dry County, I thought he sounded great on it at Manchester.

Bottom line, yes, his voice is nowhere near the 'hall-of-fame' level it used to be, and it never will be. It could be smoking; intuitively I believe Jon was never a naturally great singer to begin with, had to work to make his voice great, and didn't decide to put in the logically greater effort needed to keep his voice great the older he got.