Quote:
Originally Posted by musiccritic101
The possiblility that Jon may have had vocal cord surgery somewhere between 2015 and the 2016 THINFS promo shows has been explored a few times on this board.
People have pointed to the fact that Jon noticably can't perform basic songs like Lost Highway,Born To Follow and Leavin' Goin On properly like he did years prior,when he performs those songs his tone is completely off and he's usually off tempo he kinda sounds breathy. His lower vocal register sounds fine it's actually deepened quite a bit since 2013,his mid range is somewhat shot,as for his high register it is also shot. Jon's mid register sounds shot because he seems to lack breathing support,the same goes for his high register.
When you look at Jon's face when he performs songs like Born To Be Your Baby,Bad Name,It's My Life and Bad Medicine, he looks like he's going to pass out which means he is lacking breathing support to sustain the mids and highs in each song.
There are two obvious scenarios that might have caused Jon's lack of breathing support,
1. Smoking (Not sure if he smokes these days but I heard he quit in 2010)
2. Jon had vocal cord surgery in an attempt to fix whatever was happening with his voice and it backfired on him and he lost any range he had left and affected his breathing when singing.
There are obvious signs to support the latter,also in 2014 right up until the 2016 promo shows Jon sounded like Jon,he still had that distinct tone in his voice that even with your eyes closed you'd know it was JBJ singing. These days Jon sounds unrecognisable even his low registers sounds way different. Even a change in vocal technique isn't enough to completely change the tone in a singer's voice.
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I'd say the surgery theory is quite likely. The hoarseness and clipped tone of his voice as well as constant cracks and severe breathing/timing issues while singing are all things that didn't appear on his voice until from the first North American leg of the THINFS tour onwards.
If it were down to smoking, he'd got to have a serious problem with his lungs to sound as horrible as he does (like the early stages of pulmonary fibrosis or something), and while I certainly think Jon is an applause junkie as well as has a deep penchant for the financial rewards of his job, I don't think he's either stupid or greedy enough to play live shows with a fatal disease and therefor rip off his fans for the sake of it.
That said, he's been a smoker for the last 35 years at least, as some people here have said they saw Jon smoking off stage even as far back as on the Fahrenheit tour. He hid the habit from the public until the mid-1990s, and then, for a couple of years, it almost seemed like he was trying to make smoking a notable part of his image during the Destination Anywhere era, with him posing on many photos with a cigarette.
As for what kind of a smoker he is, I tend to think of his smoking as "on-off-and-on-again". Yes, he's had a couple of minor breaks through the years, and I believe he really tried to quit in 2010 (as it seems he was cigarette-free for a good while, judging by the restored clarity of his voice back then), but in mid-to-late 2011 he was seen smoking again during the filming breaks of the movie New Year's Eve. I also saw (obviously then-recent) photos of him smoking on an interview for a Finnish music magazine around the release of WAN, so who knows what might or might not have happened/be happening with his health nowadays - we don't know for sure if he's smoking today or not, but judging by the overall fragility of his voice as well as his facial features that seem to have aged very rapidly for his standards during the last 4-5 years (lots of wrinkles appearing quite suddenly), that would be a credible explanation as well...
