Best Prog Rock Singer

Robert Wyatt (Matching Mole, First three solo albums)
Susan Lewis (A Thinking Plague)

 

But Fish is Scottish!

NB One of my Scottish pals once sat next to him on a plane.

 

Honorable mention to James LaBrie


Dream Theater Octavarium (from Octavarium, 2005)

 

Honorable mention to Marguerita Alexandrou


The Far Meadow Himalaya Flashmob (from Given the Impossible, 2016)

 

Well, we know what kind of voice you like!

 

Honorable mention to Rosalie Cunningham


Rosalie Cunningham Ride On My Bike (from Rosalie Cunningham, 2019)

 

David Bowie (if backed by Fripp, Belew, Eno, Tippett, Levine, Bruford).

 

there are women to put forth

Maddie Prior
Sandy Denny
Jane Relf
June Tabor
Kate Bush

it's hard to broaden the list.. as the definition of PROG seems too narrow... one just thinks of British names and classical tinged rock .. but there's jazz, folk, celtic/renaissance, psychedelic, rock and pop quotations strewn into the Prog stew. I'm not up on prog enough to select from a list but I figure some of the British female folk singers were at the heart of the transition into 70s prog.

 

Greg Lake
Jon Anderson
Derek Shulman

Greg Lake has the perfect voice for prog.

 

Right you are. He sounds pretty English-y though, doesn't he? Not much trace of that Scottish brogue you hear so distinctly from Mike Scott of The Waterboys.

 

Yes, Lake is my guy too. His voice can have an angelic purity at times, even as he's singing about such awful things!

If I had to pin it to one song it might be Jerusalem. That is such an uplifting vocal.

 

it’s one word: progacolypse

 

That’s almost the name ELP got but Keith and Carl objected.

 

cool...I agree with Keith and Carl.

 

Lots of votes for John Wetton. I'm really surprised.
I have a huge amount of respect for Wetton. He played a huge role in a few bands that I listen to often.
Songwriter, bass player, guitar were his strengths. As a vocalist, he was average at best.

 

For one, his voice had a relatively unique timbre that a lot of people find attractive. He had fairly unique phrasing and breath control, including a bit of those Roger Waters-like sharp, sometimes staccato enunciations, and his voice was often well-exploited--melodies that pushed his range in just the right way, from those those nice, sustained relatively gruff higher pitches where his voice tended to sound almost like he was singing multiphonics, to the lower part of his range, which was rather velvety and where he often retained a fair amount of his British accent.

A great tune for showing off almost all of the above is King Crimson's "Lament:"

 

How about overall vocal presentation.
YES , Anderson and Squire.
Moody Blues had that quality when they sang together as well. Dream like.
Floyd with Gilmore and Wright same.

 

Adrian Belew. Loved the 81-84 KC years. His voice is Byrne-esque to my ears.

Gabriel's voice is unique, love it. Geddy and Jon Anderson's voices also unique, 'strained' at times, grew to love them as well.
Greg Lake's seems to my ears to be the cleanest and most 'trained' - also love it.
Sorry to hear Ian /JT not considered Prog, oh well.

No one listed Trevor Horn, poor guy! Chris Squire was allegedly sadistic in insisting he push his range up to Jon's resulting in vocal demise.

 

A very good song.

 

In total agreement. Whilst Red may be my single favorite Crim album, I not-so-secretly love the '80s quartet's music as much as anything they made beforehand. It felt like a collision of two worlds, but in lieu of an irreversible cataclysm, our ears got a delightful new island paradise to play sandbox with.

 

Absolutely! Well said.

 

anyone but adrian belew
greg lake is right up there, father christmas gives me the chills
i think it will come down to the best performance on a song or lp but i need to do some listenening...
not a bad assignment eh?

 

Big prog fanboy here.

Not the coolest answer, but mine would be the same as my top drummer, Phileep. He could belt it and also bring the feminine. Sounded like the real deal in the 70s and 80s, could do both the theatrics and heartfelt. He also wore a mean beard and jersey.

 

Robert may be my favourite singer, as I'm sure you know, he despises the prog genre and tag.

 

Huge shout out to the very underrated Dave Cousins. I believe Gabriel claimed him as an influence. A guy whose voice takes you on a placid country stroll and then strikes terror ranting about rotting in your grave. A harmonically rich lived in voice well before the living grew old. I'm thinking of Golden Salamander now......