Plenty of talented people could cover the 1985 USA for Africa charity song “We Are the World.” Still, Justin J. Moore expertly impersonated not one, not two, but 19 of the 21 soloists from the original.
Justin J. Moore recreated 19 voices from ‘We Are the World‘
We’re talking male and female voices, from Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen to Tina Turner and Diana Ross. In fact, the impersonation that got the most compliments was Moore’s rendition of Cyndi Lauper.
Produced by Quincy Jones and written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, “We Are the World” brought together some of the biggest voices in American music at the time. Each soloist gets only a short featured passage, but those snippets are so distinctive that listeners can often identify the singer almost instantly. In other words, the song is practically a vocal-impression obstacle course.
Here’s the full lineup Moore covered:
Lionel Richie
Stevie Wonder
Paul Simon
Kenny Rogers
James Ingram
Tina Turner
Billy Joel
Michael Jackson
Diana Ross
Dionne Warwick
Willie Nelson
Al Jarreau
Bruce Springsteen
Kenny Loggins
Steve Perry
Daryl Hall
Huey Lewis
Cyndi Lauper
Kim Carnes
The only original soloists missing were Bob Dylan and Ray Charles.
Lauper may have been one of the trickier voices in the lineup to reproduce. Her 1980s sound combines a bright, piercing quality with expressive vibrato and playful, almost cartoonish inflections. She’s also a master mimicker herself. As a child, she practiced by imitating characters from Broadway albums like My Fair Lady and West Side Story, shifting her pitch to develop unusual tonal flexibility and control.
How Justin J. Moore creates his singer impressions
Moore grew up learning the fundamentals of singing from his Juilliard-trained, opera-singing parents. That classical foundation taught him to pay close attention to the mechanics of singing, giving him a strong foundation for understanding what makes one voice sound different from another.
He later studied a wide range of singing styles, including rock and pop, giving him an even bigger palette of sounds and techniques to draw from. Now, he teaches those skills through courses on vocal impressions, breaking down the techniques that make a singer’s voice recognizable.
In one YouTube video, Moore breaks down how he impersonates singers like Adam Levine. For that impression, he explains that Levine keeps his voice toward the back of his throat while using a relatively wide-open mouth for vowels. Ed Sheeran, conversely, puts the sound farther forward and keeps the mouth relatively small when producing vowel sounds.
That makes it clear that a convincing vocal impression involves much more than simply changing your pitch. Moore pays attention to where a singer places the sound, how open the mouth is, the shape of the vowels, and the physical habits that accompany a particular vocal style. Those small changes can make two singers with similar ranges sound completely different.
Moore imagines famous singers performing other hit songs
He also has videos that are just as educational and entertaining, where he imagines different artists singing other iconic songs. For instance, there’s Radiohead’s “Creep,” sung by Michael Bublé, and Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” sung by Brendon Urie of Panic! At the Disco.
What’s fascinating about watching these videos isn’t just Moore’s singing ability. It’s how thoroughly he seems to analyze what makes each singer sound like themselves, then recreate those details in his own voice.
And that’s certainly part of what makes the “We Are the World” performance so much fun to watch. It’s a pretty remarkable demonstration of just how much goes into a great vocal impression.
