Top Ten Most Vulnerable Sounding Songs
A vulnerable song is a song that sounds very petite and delicate, usually showing a certain authenticity and honest emotion. While most songs that try to deliver a certain feeling want to achieve this by giving a powerful and extrovert performance, there are also some songs that do the exact opposite. The singing is done very quietly, the syllables are rarely drawn out and maybe there are even a few charming imperfections in the delivery. The outcome is that it sounds less staged and way more natural than the more climatic songs we are used to. There is a certain warmth in the way the songs are sung we rarely hear in the more extrovert pieces of music. Often, yet not always, vulnerable vocal performances are backed by minimalistic instrumentals, often only consisting of a single instrument.
A unique Nirvana cover made for this list. Just play the song sample.
It's a pity how I - and most other people, judging by a majority of the comments on both YouTube and Amazon - discovered this song and its singer: because it was played in some episodes of "Drawn Together". Don't get me wrong, DT's deeply dark, sick, twisted, deranged humor is awesome (why was the series cancelled so early, by the way? It was highly successful!) but the exact opposite of the song.
This song is about her being honest with her lover about all the little oddities she likes. I have never heard of this singer otherwise, but this is a true treasure I bet the majority of people out there will never discover. Maybe several people who watched the series won't even know this is a "real" song. As I said, a pity. This song is pure beauty.
His voice and style sound vulnerable in general, and many of his songs can be on this list. Great singer.
Yes, this is a Slayer cover, and Raining Blood is one of the heaviest and most aggressive metal songs. But Tori Amos made it sound vulnerable. She made it slow, and it's only her sad vocals and piano. It sounds like a completely different song. Unbelievable how she transformed this song.
Well, the German culture lesson continues: may I introduce you to Annett Louisan, Germany's top female chanson singer in the 21st century. Otherwise, it would be Alexandra.
Louisan is known for her mature songs about relationships, mature in the sense of grown-up and classy. Her songs involve topics such as ending a relationship when it gets too serious, disappointing her lover who had bigger expectations, or not wanting to be with the seemingly perfect man because he reminds her of an unpleasant former lover. Louisan portrays a woman who knows what she wants in a world that doesn't. Often, she is in it for the fun, thinking her partner knows, but unintentionally hurts someone who takes it more seriously.
But "Das Liebeslied" is different. This time, she falls in love and doesn't like it. She has "already too much to lose at this point," she sings in the chorus. She doesn't like not being in control of her feelings, maybe afraid of being hurt. This makes her other lyrics more understandable.
It's a song in Italian. According to Google Translate, the title translates to "A Great Love".
M2M were a perfect example of vulnerable and heartfelt music. Two girls had just discovered what teen life was, with their world turned upside down by their feelings of imperfection, first love, or lack of love. They wrote their music themselves and played the guitars. "Shades of Purple" is one of my favorite albums because it captures all the doubts and insecurities you have as a young, inexperienced teenager. Nothing melodramatic, nothing trying to be cool, and nothing crude. Marit Larsen pretty much stayed like this until today, while Marion Raven became a tough rock chick. Maybe that's why they grew apart after two albums.
"Girl In Your Dreams" stands out as an especially vulnerable, intimate moment. The girl they impersonate acknowledges she is not the ultimate beauty ideal her lover may want, but she has honest feelings and would do everything for him, though that's not enough for him. M2M have such a natural way of performing and writing that even basic things, like them singing about smiling or crying, indeed change your mood to happy or sad, respectively.
You know, modern schlager isn't exactly my genre, but I don't pan it like many people do. It's often lighthearted, easily digestible, completely harmless, unedgy, and simple pop with lyrics about love and occasionally something fun. That's fine. Some schlager singers can actually sing well, and there is worse than forgettable music.
But Andrea Berg, who is arguably the second most famous female schlager singer after Helene Fischer, has something I really like. Maybe it's that she also has songs that are not all happy. Maybe it's that even her happy songs at least have beautiful wordings. Maybe it's that in recent years she writes her own songs while other schlager singers are solely performers.
Since I heard this song, I am pretty sure it's because her voice has so much feeling to it. Fischer is a gifted singer who could also easily perform classic soul songs (in fact, she did at a show) and wouldn't need to perform mere schlager songs. But Berg has this honest, not-so-polished voice that stands out.
This song has something very fatal about it, and even though the lyrics are very vague and open to interpretation, I am somehow very sure it is about a dual suicide by a couple that feels the world doesn't understand them.
I always loved the studio voices of the t.A.T.u. girls, the accent, the mix of soft and shrieking vocals, and how everything they perform sounds full of extreme and often contradicting emotion. The chorus of "Clowns (Can You See Me Now?)" changes from delicate, child-like vocals to punk-ish screaming within a second. Just do yourself a favor and don't ruin the magic by googling a live performance.
Yes, this is definitely a song I hadn't thought of when creating a list that deserves to be on it.
The Fugees' version is also great, yet not vulnerable. I love that it sounds colder and not as warm as Roberta Flack's singing. Flack is more shy and melancholic when the singer on stage sings about her life. Hill is more like she's in a state of shock. She's a more intense and dominant personality, and she has to let the experience sink in.
I must say the talking, announcing, and chanting done by the other members of the Fugees sometime in between (it's not really rapping) only make sense on the album. Otherwise, the song would sound extremely out of place on the relatively bleak hip hop album. But on its own, it slightly annoys when you want to get into Hill's feeling.
Oh, Lenna Kuurmaa. You have, quite possibly, my most favorite voice of all. I grew up to your singing and since then have never heard anyone remotely like you.
On "The Coldest Night," which is about a woman that is scared to show her lover the darker sides of herself, Kuurmaa's voice feels just as insecure as the person described. In fact, she sings in the chorus as if she is truly frightened by what may happen if she reveals her dark secret (whatever it may be, we never get to know), as if she would shiver and is close to tears.
I am a massive fan of Björk. "Post" ranks among my favorite albums of all time. If she is more on the pop side, she is extraordinary pop. If she does avant-garde, it's not as unnecessarily difficult to listen to or intentionally challenging as other art musicians. She really feels the music in its true essence, looks beyond the horizon, and understands everything on the planet can be music. Music is life, and the planet is life. (Sorry if that sounded cheesy, but that's what I get from her.)
But even with all that admiration, I am still not sure if she is a good singer. I have no idea what makes me so unsure. She hits all the right notes, and in some songs, she can belt at an astounding level, but somehow she always sounds... exhausted. I don't know if this is just me or if others noticed it as well. But that does not weaken my great opinion of her because the overall music is great and an outstanding and amazing experience. It certainly helps this very minimalistic song sound all the more gripping and honest.
If you ever need to convince someone that Britney Spears is not just looks, then play this song. Britney's first four albums were great pop music, mostly because she knew how she needed to act to authentically deliver a certain mood. "In the Zone" has songs that are very temptingly erotic, but then it also has this song, which is among the most emotional pop ballads of the 2000s. It is not oversung like Aguilera's, Beyoncé's, Anastacia's, or Shakira's truly great ballads. It is calmer, quieter, and it really makes you stop to listen to it carefully. There are so many nuances in her performance that the impact is even more powerful than the loudest belting.
Unfortunately, the albums after "In the Zone" made her entire career dependent on the catchiness of the material she gets offered, as the producers decided to drown her voice in thick layers of autotune.
She's a French actress, but singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg wrote this song for her.
A song by an all-female pop hip-hop group known for establishing foul language in Germany may not be what you expect to find on a list like this, but this song is different. Firstly, it's not performed over a hip-hop beat. With acoustic guitars, a soft piano, and what sounds like real soft percussion, it is more like a chanson.
Secondly, the lyrics nostalgically tell the story of a summer romance the protagonist experienced with a French man some years ago. She fell in love with him, and he always told her their love would last forever, but as the summer holiday ended, so did the relationship. She also mentions how those were the sweetest lies she ever heard. In the third chorus, she reveals she also lied to him, telling him she was still a virgin or exaggerating his beauty and strength. The song's tone is overall bittersweet. Many years have passed since the events, and she thinks back to the fun they had together. The rapping is done very softly and with a constant smile on her lips.
American audiences may know this song because it was sampled in the unofficial posthumous Tupac song "Close My Eyes." The song, an English-language version of "Wer bin ich," has the singer wondering why exactly her lover wants her. It could have turned out cheesy with lines like "afraid to close my eyes 'cause I don't wanna miss a moment of you," but it manages to capture the extreme feelings you have when in love. Plus, LaFee's voice is so soft you can picture her lying in bed next to her sleeping boyfriend and thinking, "Why me, out of all girls?"
I put this at the tenth position in my original remix because, after the second chorus, it has a break from the minimalistic piano-based instrumental. It adds powerful drums and a melodic guitar solo before returning to the original tone with a bit more instrumentation. This is a great moment in the song, almost goosebump-inducing, but this particular section is not very vulnerable, though the rest of the song is.
Yeah, it was the first song I could think of that fit the bill.
