[hanabiwings]

I still don't know what people are talking about when speaking of squeakiness. To squeak would be to have some sort of squeak in the voice that is unwanted (i.e. when a boy is going through puberty and his voice falters.) Her first recordings were using the way that she learned to sing. When singing higher notes, she always projected through the mask of the face (which includes the nose) and made her sound more nasally. I think this was the most comfortable way for her to hit the higher notes. She's gone away from it because this is stressful to the voice and caused her voice to become ragged in the first tour she did (2000.) Moreover, her voice has sustained trauma from overuse and thus it MAY be that she can no longer sing with the same kind of clarity she did when she debuted and uses vibrato to compensate.

On a related note, she no longer sings UNITE!, Trauma, or Duty in the same key she did when recording. I checked the latest countdown's version of Duty with the original, which I had been watching on a tour DVD from 2001. They do not match keys. I think that it was a mistake for them to have written the music so high at the beginning and now she can no longer hit those notes because of overuse and strain.