Singers with Unique Voices: Jónsi (The Unique Voices Club #44)

Every other Friday, I write a post about singers with unique voices not commonly heard in mainstream music. My goal? To educate emerging artists, music lovers and musical theatre creators while inspiring them to embrace their own quirks. This week, I'm writing on Jónsi.

He collaborated with Troye Sivan and so this was from his Wiki Fandom page

I've never been anywhere in Europe other than the UK and France (the 3-hour layover in Amsterdam doesn't count because I never left the airport), but other than Ireland and Finland, it would be so unbelievably cool to go to Iceland, the home of Jónsi, lead singer of the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós.

I'm loosely familiar with Icelandic music thanks to me discovering Valbørg on the Iceland version of The Voice some moons ago. But I got to know about Sigur Rós because my eleventh-grade English teacher was a Doofenshmirtz-looking type from Serbia who decided he was going to play us music from one of his favorite bands during a free period. Technically if you've seen the movies We Bought a Zoo or How to Train Your Dragon, you've definitely heard some of Jónsi's music (and he's indie!). It's a kind of classical folktronica hybrid where he plays the guitar with a cello bow alongside his bird-like falsetto that would rival Adam Levine's. You can watch my reaction and commentary below:

As I say in the video, the American music world could take a page or two from that of other countries, especially when we have artists like Ellie Goulding, Björk and Kate Bush who got big in their countries and managed to break into the American music market with their innovation and genre-bending. You can't really determine what's marketable because your fans are human beings who have varied interests and their own understanding of what sounds good to them and so will decide accordingly. And given the rise of social media and other online communities like this one, it's not as hard to find people who find you interesting as it was maybe a decade ago.

Which is why, if you have your own catalog of independent artists that you believe belong in future episodes of The Unique Voices Club, then I advise you to join my Firebird Flock. For as little as $14/month, you get access to older Unique Voices Club posts when I monetize them after being live for a week, and you'll get access to the forum where you can share these artists with other members and listen to what they have to share too. You'll be joining a movement.

Stay educated,

Alexia