Here’s where we start to whittle down the best, to get the best of the best. Vote early and vote often, and don’t hate the messenger if some of these are hard decisions right off the bat.

For the samples, I tried to pick songs that typified the artist’s voice and/or were just fun to listen to. Sometimes I cut out intros to get right to the voice in question; if folks find that annoying I can just edit the links to start at the beginning of the songs.

Lastly, I’ve already made some mistakes, and one of the worst was leaving an artist off the seeding round, where he almost certainly would have qualified. So by way of apologies, here’s the late, great Michael Hutchence:

Voting in this round will end at 9 PM, Eastern Time, on Friday 9/30.