There was a time when being a singer meant you had to bring the house down with one note. You didn’t just hold a tune—you held court. You commanded the stage with a voice that could gut an arena full of people and leave them clinging to the last note like it was their therapy. Celine Dion wasn’t just singing, she was testifying. Whitney Houston didn’t just hit the high notes, she became them. And Mariah Carey? Please. She practically trademarked emotional melisma. These women sang like their lungs were personally anointed by a higher power—though I, an atheist, can confirm that the only thing holy was the sheer velocity of those vocals.
Back then, it felt like vocal power was the badge of honor. If you couldn’t go from whisper to wail in three seconds flat, were you even trying? You didn’t need to write the song. You just had to make it yours. That was the art. You interpreted. You embodied. You made someone else’s heartbreak sound like it was happening to you in real-time.
But over the past two decades, the needle has shifted. Power isn’t just in the voice anymore—it’s in the pen. We’ve witnessed the rise of the storyteller-singer. Taylor Swift is the poster child, sure, but she’s not alone. These artists don’t need to belt—they whisper, confess, spiral, and unpack. They don’t need a big chorus to sell it; sometimes, all they need is a lyric that cuts a little too close to your last therapy session. They’re giving you diary entries with a hook.
This isn’t a complaint. It’s an observation. There’s power in intimacy. There’s a quiet bravery in handing someone your truth without embellishment. When Taylor says “You kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath,” it doesn’t need to be screamed. It just lands. Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski—these women are redefining what it means to be a powerhouse. Their strength is in the detail, the restraint, the unpolished edge.
It’s a shift that mirrors how we, as a culture, consume music. We’re less about the spectacle and more about the connection. We stream. We shuffle. We listen in our headphones while pretending we’re in an A24 movie. We want to feel seen, not blown away. There’s a reason the stripped-down acoustic track lives next to the overproduced pop banger in every playlist. We contain multitudes—and now, so do our artists.
Still, I can’t help but miss the drama sometimes. I miss when a modulation was treated like a sacred event. I miss when a bridge was built for emotional combustion, not quiet resolution. I miss when an artist would hold a note so long, it became an Olympic event. I still get chills when Aretha hits that note in “A Natural Woman.” Don’t get me wrong—Taylor’s entire Folklore era was stunning. But try running on a treadmill to it. You can’t. You’ll cry before you hit 3.0 mph.
It’s not about which is better—it’s about how the industry has stretched. And in that stretch, we’ve allowed more room for nuance, more room for vulnerability, more room for art that whispers instead of wails. But let’s not forget the women (and some men) who wailed for their lives and built the stage on which the whisperers now perform.
Celine, Whitney, Mariah, Aretha—they handed us the blueprint of emotional maximalism. They made pain beautiful and big and bold. The new wave is handing us the quiet ache, the slow burn, the Instagram caption in song form. And both matter. Both hit. Both deserve their place.
The trick, I think, is to not forget either. There’s room for a key change and a cardigan. There’s room for a whisper and a wail. There’s room for all of us in the house of music—even if we sit on different ends of the emotional volume dial.
Now excuse me while I belt “All By Myself” in my living room with the force of a thousand crying gays… before softly pressing play on “Mirrorball.” Balance.