The case for number ten
Prince scores 90, and the singing is the least discussed thing about him
Tenth on The Cove 100, level on points with Donny Hathaway at eleven. A musician of his stature is usually rated on everything except the voice. This entry rates only the voice.
The Cove editorial desk · Published 17 September 2026
The difficulty with placing Prince on a list of singers is that singing was one of perhaps six things he did at the highest level, and the others are louder. Strip away the writing, the playing, the arranging and the stagecraft, score what is left, and a 90 is what remains — which is a great deal.
Instrument: 23
Really two instruments. The falsetto is the famous one and it is genuinely exceptional: light, accurate, sustainable at length, and used as a primary voice rather than an ornament, which almost nobody does. The chest voice below it is a rougher, more conventional rock-soul tenor, effective but not remarkable.
Twenty-three reflects that split. Judged on the falsetto alone the number would be higher; judged on the full instrument, there is a good voice and an outstanding one sharing a throat, and the join between them is deliberate rather than seamless. He used the gap as an effect, which is interpretation, and the component has to score the raw material.
Live: 24
The singing held up under conditions that would defeat most of this list: playing lead guitar, leading a band by hand signal, dancing, and singing in a register that leaves no margin for error. Falsetto is unforgiving live — it exposes fatigue immediately — and the documented performances show very little of it across long sets and long tours.
The point comes off because the vocal was, by design, one element in an arrangement rather than the focus of it. The shows were built as performances of music, not as vehicles for a voice, and there are long stretches where the singing is deliberately subordinate. That is an artistic choice and a correct one; the component still has to note that a smaller share of the evening tests the voice than it does with Mercury at 25.
Interpretation: 23
Strongest in the way he used register as meaning. Switching from chest voice to falsetto mid-phrase is, in his hands, a change of persona rather than a change of pitch, and it carries information the lyric does not state. That is a genuine interpretive device and he is the person who developed it furthest.
It stays at 23 because the readings are frequently subordinated to rhythm and arrangement. Where Marvin Gaye will slow a phrase to let a line land, Prince will keep it locked to the groove, because the groove is the point. The result is more exciting and less revealing, and the component measures the revealing.
Influence: 20
The vocal influence is narrower than the musical influence, and the component measures only the first. What passed on is the legitimacy of male falsetto as a lead register in pop and R&B: a generation of singers work in a range that was, before him, mostly reserved for ornament or for groups.
What did not pass on is everything that made it work, because the falsetto was inseparable from the writing and the arranging. Singers took the register; almost nobody took the method. Twenty is the same judgement this list makes of Luther Vandross — deep influence inside a narrow channel.
What 90 means, and why he is above Donny Hathaway
Prince and Hathaway both score 90, and the cards differ in exactly two places by one point each: Prince is ahead on Influence, Hathaway on Interpretation. Nothing in the arithmetic separates them.
The method produces the score; where totals tie, the ordering is an editorial call, and this edition states its reason rather than hiding it. Prince is placed first because his advantage is in consequence that crossed idioms, while Hathaway's advantage is in a component where his superiority, though real, operates within one. Readers who weight Interpretation above Influence should reverse the two, and Hathaway's entry argues exactly that.
Scores follow the published method: four components of twenty-five points each, equally weighted. Prince died in 2016; the performances discussed here are the recorded and broadcast ones, and the assessments are editorial opinion about the singing alone.