Credit: Far Out / George Michael Estate
October 19th, 2026 · 10:00am BST
There are only a few musicians who could ever sing the same way that George Michael could in his prime.
Most people try their best to keep their voice in good enough shape over the years to where they could hit the right notes, but it took a real understanding of how to sing to make a song like ‘Careless Whisper’ work. What Michael was doing was unlike anything that a traditional pop kid had ever done, but that was because Michael never wanted to be considered a straight-ahead pop star in the traditional sense.
Some of his biggest heroes were the ones who took the most chances, and you could hear a lot of the influences in whatever songs he was making. While tracks like ‘Praying for Time’ were written with John Lennon in mind, Michael never bothered to make a carbon copy of something that he would have written. He wanted to absorb that kind of music and make his own take on it, which is why that song in particular is one of the few times where Lennon’s wit came out of someone other than the former Beatle.
The same could be said about the way that Michael emulated his heroes like Freddie Mercury. He knew that reaching the level of someone like David Bowie was bound to be impossible, but when you look at the way that he owned the stage when performing with Queen during the late frontman’s tribute concert, Michael seemed to be able to handle absolutely anything that was thrown at him when he made ‘Somebody to Love’.
Those were songs that he had been singing his entire life, but rock and roll was only one facet of what he did. He was the definition of what a pop star was supposed to look like, but when you stripped away all of the gloss behind a lot of what he was doing, he was one of the greatest soul singers of all time who was trapped in the body of a pop star. So if he didn’t look the part, he could at least sound like it.
Which is why many of his later albums pull extensively from all kinds of R&B. He was trying his hand at making a name for himself next to the Lauryn Hills of the world when he reached the 1990s, but even when he was trying out going solo for the first time, he knew that anyone who tried to compete with what Aretha Franklin was going to make themselves look like a damn fool in her presence.
There was pure muscle coming out of her voice whenever she sang, and Michael figured that the angels were at work whenever she sang, saying, “My feeling is don’t even dream of competing with Aretha Franklin. [Hers] is a voice from heaven and I can’t riff. I can’t do that whole Boyz II Men thing when you sing 80 notes in two seconds. I don’t have the power that [she] has. The thing to do with Aretha is that you have to nail down the melody, because she’s going to make it her own and turn it into an incredible piece of music.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And in execution, Michael still shows his stuff perfectly well on ‘I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)’ alongside one of the queens of pop singing. No one else would have dared to riff the way that she did, and even if he did have that gospel-style talent for making musical runs, there was no way that they were going to go over as well as the same person that brought ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman’ to life.
She was the epitome of what a glorious singer was supposed to sound like, and Michael would have been just as happy sitting in the background and watching her work her magic as he would be singing with her. Because even if you were going line for line with Franklin, anyone was going to be competing for second place whenever they started to deliver their own powerhouse performance.
