Aaron Neville

Is that a nightingale perched outside the window? A misplaced angel who took a wrong turn at the Milky Way? No, the heavenly voice you’ll encounter here belongs to the very earthly being known as Aaron Neville. The New Orleans native’s first claim to fame came as a young man, with the incandescent glow of R&B ballad “Tell It Like It Is,” a ’60s smash quickly covered by everyone from Otis Redding to Percy Sledge. Decades later, he hit the spotlight as the frontman for his family band, the Neville Brothers, his trilling tremolo more angelic than ever, as he applied it with equal ease to slippery funk (“Yellow Moon”) and soulful spirituals (“Amazing Grace”).

In Next Steps, stomp, swoon, and sway with Aaron’s solo sojourn.

With the success of the Neville Brothers at the end of the ’80s, a certain honey-voiced frontman started gaining lots of attention. (How could he not?) Soon, Aaron Neville was soaring up the charts as a solo artist for the first time since the ’60s. He lent his pristine pipes to everything from a jazzy take on the doo-wop classic “In the Still of the Night” to the candlelit croon of ’30s standard “These Foolish Things.” Even surrounded by a stellar cast, including Dr. John and Mavis Staples on an all-star reinvention of Ray Charles’ R&B shouter “What’d I Say,” Neville’s voice commands complete attention, making even the most familiar tune seem like it’s being sung for the very first time.

The bayou balladeer begins a street-corner serenade, in Deep Cuts.

Aaron Neville’s ethereal voice has ventured all over the stylistic spectrum, from country to pop and beyond, but his grounding is in ’50s R&B. It seems somehow fitting to hear the Penguins’ doo-wop classic “Earth Angel” sung by a voice that’s equal parts earthy and angelic. Neville is a musical Moses coming down from the mountaintop when he delivers his version of the Moonglows’ 1958 hit “Ten Commandments of Love.” He knows his way around the era’s pop milestones, too, and his tender touch on the Nat “King” Cole smash “Mona Lisa” could make even Da Vinci’s demure beauty break out in an ear-to-ear grin.

With his hulking frame, tattoos, and bodybuilder’s biceps, Aaron Neville always looked more like a biker than a balladeer, but when he opens up his mouth, something gentle, warm, and almost otherworldly emerges. That one-of-a-kind voice has been casting its spell since the ’60s, and it was just as bewitching when he gained renown in the ’80s with his band of brothers as it was when he returned to solo stardom in the ’90s. Whether you find him serving up a percolating New Orleans party groove with the Neville Brothers or striking out on his own and reinventing everything from the Philly soul of “Everybody Plays the Fool” to the classic country weeper “The Grand Tour,” Aaron Neville doesn’t simply sing a song — he inhabits it. Take your own grand tour through the Essentials we’ve gathered from the almost-five-decade flight of a voice for the ages.