Bands With the Most Lead Singers: 13 Voices Across 18 Albums
Of the bands with the most lead singers in my catalogue, Fleetwood Mac are the outright winner: 13 different people are credited with singing on their 18 studio albums between 1968 and 2003. Deep Purple, the band most people name first, reached six across 24 albums. The gap is not close, and it only shows up if you count from the credits.
The 13 Fleetwood Mac Voices, in the Order They First Appear
These are the names credited with vocals, as opposed to backing vocals alone, on my Fleetwood Mac research sheet. The years are the album where each one first sings.
- Peter Green, Fleetwood Mac (1968)
- Jeremy Spencer, Fleetwood Mac (1968)
- Danny Kirwan, Then Play On (1969)
- Christine McVie, Future Games (1971)
- Bob Welch, Future Games (1971)
- Dave Walker, Penguin (1973)
- Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac (1975)
- Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac (1975)
- Billy Burnette, Behind the Mask (1990)
- Rick Vito, Behind the Mask (1990)
- Bekka Bramlett, Time (1995)
- Dave Mason, Time (1995)
- Mick Fleetwood, Time (1995)
One qualification, because it matters. Christine McVie is on the map from Mr Wonderful in 1968, but as Christine Perfect on piano. Her first vocal credit comes three albums later, and she then sings on every record to the end, sixteen stations in all.
Why the Count Is Higher Than Anyone Guesses
Ask a Fleetwood Mac fan how many singers the band has had, and you tend to get three: Green, Nicks, Buckingham. Perhaps four with Christine McVie. The reason the real figure is 13 is that three separate eras each carried their own voices, and two of those eras are the ones nobody plays.
The blues years alone account for four. Green, Spencer and Kirwan all sang, and Dave Walker arrived for Penguin in 1973, sang on two tracks, and never appeared again. This is a single-station branch line and one of the shortest on the print.
Then there are the 1990s. Behind the Mask in 1990 brings in Billy Burnette and Rick Vito on vocals. Time in 1995 brings in Bekka Bramlett, Dave Mason of Traffic, and Mick Fleetwood himself, credited with guitars and vocals on track 13 alongside the drums. Five new singers in two albums, on the two records furthest from the popular story.
Time also carries thirteen credited musicians, tying with Say You Will in 2003 as the busiest station on the map, against five on Rumours. The album everybody owns has the smallest cast on the sheet.
How the Other Long Careers Compare
I counted the same way on three more maps where the vocal line changes hands. In each case, the figure is everyone credited taking a lead vocal somewhere, including one-track guests, because that is exactly what a branch line on the print represents.
| Map | Releases | Years | People credited singing lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fleetwood Mac | 18 | 1968 to 2003 | 13 |
| Deep Purple | 24 | 1968 to 2026 | 6 |
| Tom Petty | 20 | 1976 to 2016 | 5 |
| Simple Minds | 20 | 1979 to 2022 | 2 |
Note what that table does not do. It does not reward the longest career. Deep Purple have six more studio albums than Fleetwood Mac and eight more years, and still comes out with fewer than half the voices.
Deep Purple: Four Singers, and Two More Hiding in the Track Credits
The famous count is four. Rod Evans sings the first three albums, Ian Gillan takes over from Deep Purple in Rock in 1970 and reaches 17 stations in total, David Coverdale holds Burn, Stormbringer and Come Taste the Band, and Joe Lynn Turner sings Slaves and Masters in 1990 and nothing else.
The sheet adds two more. Glenn Hughes is credited with lead vocals on specific tracks across the same three mid-seventies albums, sharing the job with Coverdale rather than replacing him. Tommy Bolin, hired as the guitarist for Come Taste the Band in 1975, takes the lead vocal on track four of his only album with the band.
That is the difference between a line-up list and a credit sheet. A line-up list says four. The credits say six, and the map has to draw all six.
The Surprise Is Tom Petty, Not Deep Purple
Tom Petty sings on all 20 releases on his map, which is the whole point of the catalogue. He is also, by my count, one of five people who take a lead vocal on it, and the other four are the detail nobody expects.
Mike Campbell sings lead on "I Don't Wanna Fight" on Echo in 1999 and on "Victim of Circumstance" on the second Mudcrutch album in 2016. Benmont Tench takes "This Is a Good Street" on Mudcrutch in 2008 and "Welcome to Hell" in 2016. Tom Leadon sings "Queen of the Go-Go Girls" and co-leads "The Other Side of the Mountain", and Randall Marsh sings "Beautiful World".
Four of those five credits sit on the two Mudcrutch records. Petty reassembled his pre-Heartbreakers band and immediately handed the microphone round, which is not something you would guess from a tracklist.
The Other End: One Voice for Forty-Three Years
Simple Minds are the cleanest counterexample in the catalogue. Jim Kerr is credited on all 20 releases from Life in a Day in 1979 to Direction of the Heart in 2022, and the only other lead vocal anywhere on the sheet belongs to Sarah Brown, on "In Dreams" from Walk Between Worlds in 2018.
On the print that reads as one line running the full width of the sheet with everything else moving underneath it. Set the Simple Minds map beside the Fleetwood Mac one and the difference is visible from the far side of a room, before you have read a single station name.
That contrast is the thing a discography list cannot do and a map can. The count is a fact. The shape is the argument.
How I Decide What Counts as a Singer
Two rules keep these figures honest. First, backing vocals alone do not make somebody a singer for the purposes of this count, or the Fleetwood Mac figure would run past thirty and mean nothing.
Second, a credit is a credit regardless of how many tracks it covers. Dave Walker sang on two songs of one album in 1973 and he is on the map, because leaving him off would be me editing the record rather than drawing it. The same applies to Tommy Bolin's single lead vocal and to Randall Marsh's one song.
I count from the research sheet, not from a band biography. Where a sleeve and a published line-up history disagree, the sleeve wins, and the disagreement usually turns out to be the interesting part.
Sizes, and Which Map Shows This Best
The Fleetwood Mac discography art print is the one to look at if this count is what interests you, because all 13 vocal lines are on the same sheet. The Deep Purple discography art print shows the opposite case, four long vocal lines handing over cleanly.
Both come in A2 (420 x 594mm) and A1 (594 x 841mm), with 24x18 in and 36x24 in for the US, from £42. Every size is a Giclée on 230gsm textured matte fine art paper, archival and acid-free, supplied unframed or ready to hang in a black wood frame.
For a count like this, A1 earns its price. At A2 you can see that the vocal lines change; at A1 you can read which of the 13 is which without leaning in.
Related Music Maps
The companion piece to this one is which bands have had the most drummers, counted the same way off the same sheets. For the two career shapes named above, see Tom Petty albums in order and Simple Minds albums in order.
Questions About Counting Singers
Which band has the most lead singers?
Of the 70 discographies I have mapped, Fleetwood Mac, with 13 people credited singing across 18 studio albums between 1968 and 2003. Deep Purple are second among the maps I have counted, with six across 24 albums.
How many lead singers have Deep Purple had?
Four held the job: Rod Evans, Ian Gillan, David Coverdale and Joe Lynn Turner. Two more are credited with a lead vocal without ever being the singer, Glenn Hughes across three mid-seventies albums and Tommy Bolin on one track of Come Taste the Band.
Do backing vocalists get a line on the map?
Yes, everyone credited gets a line, but they are not counted as singers in this piece. The count here is people credited with a lead or shared lead vocal, which is a much smaller group.
What is not included in these figures?
Live albums, compilations and greatest hits sets, because they are not on the maps. Guest singers on a live recording or a hits collection do not appear, and neither does anything released after the artwork was drawn.
Where do the numbers come from?
My own research sheets, one per artist, built from sleeve credits and session listings, with a column per album and a row per credited musician. They are the same sheets the artwork is drawn from, so the print and the count always agree.
Buying One
If you are buying this as a gift and the band is the easy part but the size is not, a gift card for music fans lets them choose. Everything else sits in the music map art print collection, all of it counted the same way, one credit at a time.
