Elton John's voice is deepening as he ages and he can no longer hit the high notes in his own songs. Besides this change, his voice still sounds beautiful. His more recent songs are written with his new vocal range in mind, allowing the warmth and power of his voice to resonate. But live performances of his older songs sound lacking.
Billy Joel suffers the same fate and has adjusted cleverly. When performing, he uses a digital piano inside a hollowed out grand piano. This allows him to play his songs as written, but dropped down to a more comfortable key at the flick of a switch. He still doesn't typically hit the very high notes in the River of Dreams or An Innocent Man. But those notes might have been outside his comfortable range even when recorded, since he stopped trying to hit them very soon after recording them.
Billy Joel says he doesn't like his voice, so he is often trying to sound like someone else. I can see that. Elton's voice is inherently beautiful and stands on its own. Billy's has inherent qualities, but it evolved with each album. He sounded like a folksy singer-songwriter in the 1970s and modern and metallic by the middle 1980s. Perhaps he had found a happy medium for his last recordings in the 1990s. Elton, however, has sounded consistent throughout his career.
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