A Look At Falsetto Hits Through The Years

Turn on the radio, access a playlist, or just listen to the background music of life and I bet within 10 minutes you’re going to hear a song with a male falsetto voice. The more you pay attention, the more songs and singers that you find are using it.

Falsetto comes from the Italian word “false voice,” and not all male singers have a strong one. That said, Justin Bieber, the Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Drake, Charlie Puth, Shawn Mendes, Adam Levine, Sam Smith all have had hits using it. Looking backwards, Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees made a career out of his “false voice.”

By the way, the first recorded example of falsetto came way back in 1911 by George T. Watson, who was a yodeler. Yes, yodeling is falsetto at its finest.

Falsetto singing is a lot more popular than you think and Vox analyzed 20,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 using vocal data sourced from Pandora’s Music Genome Project to find out. They came up with a score of how much falsetto is used in a song, which led to some great charts.

The following video also provides a number of excellent examples as well. Enjoy!

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