I already featured Floor Jansen in my entries on Symphonic Rock, Folk Rock and Covers. I consider her the greatest vocalist I've ever heard, so I’m doing some posts just on her. Hopefully you’ll come away with a sense of why I think she is so special.
Jansen, who has been Nightwish’s frontwoman since late 2012, regularly sings from the high tenor range to E6 without any loss of power, finesse or clarity. She easily handles romantic ballads, pop, classical and opera arias, and heavy metal. The only singers I have heard of with comparable range are Yma Sumac and Dimash Kudaibergen, and they lack her versatility. Sumac also never had Jansen’s power and depth of tone. Kudaibergen has power, and had classical training, but professionally he has yet to venture out of his lane in pop music. Meanwhile, mainstream opera and classical singers as a rule avoid testing themselves in other styles or genres, so we will never know what most of them might have been capable of. Among Western non-classically trained singers, perhaps Freddie Mercury was in Jansen’s class, but I can’t think of anyone else.
Starting with simplicity: Here, on “Beste Zangers”, a Dutch reality show featuring small groups of established recording artists, Jansen sings a ballad. “Mama”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj1ibZrjQTs
This song honors Eugene Shoemaker, the geologist and astronomer. He discovered several families of asteroids and comets (you may remember Shoemaker-Levy, whose collision with Jupiter got global coverage here on Earth). He showed that craters on the Earth and Moon were caused by meteor impacts. He ran the Geoscience program at NASA, and was himself slated for an Apollo Moon mission. He was disqualified for medical reasons, which he admitted was the greatest disappointment of his life. After his death, his ashes were taken to the Moon on a NASA probe and laid to rest in a crater named after him—the only person to date interred on another planetary body. The capsule holding his ashes is inscribed with a passage from Romeo and Juliet, which you will hear in voice-over in this song.
I included this clip previously in my first post on Symphonic Rock. If you missed it then, don't miss it now. In keeping with the theme of the song, the ending is truly out of this world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjp_DfvJimg
Here is Jansen at her day job, performing live with Nightwish. This is a bit of rock opera. “Stargazers”:
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