Luther Vandross

His ten planets divide three in earth, three in air, two in fire and two in water, an even spread with nothing scarce and nothing dominant. Vandross sang backing on Bowie's Young Americans before a solo career that sold thirty five million records, and he won four Grammys the year after a stroke ended his singing.

The Sun sits twelve minutes of arc from the end of Aries, so Taurus cannot be ruled out without a birth hour. Aries goes first and Taurus holds a note until it is finished with it. The Moon answers from Libra, which attends to the other person in the room. The chart genuinely will not say which of those two signs is the identity, and both readings fit a record that names the backing work and the solo career in the same line.

The Sun sits in easy contact with Jupiter one hundredth of a degree from exact, which is as close as this project ever finds a pair, and Mercury sits conjunct Mars at three quarters of a degree, so speech and drive occupy the same place in the sign that holds a tone. Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were all retrograde at his birth, and nothing in the chart forms a named pattern. For a singer who produced his own records as well as singing on them, speech and drive in the same place is the part of the chart doing the arranging.

He died at Edison on 1 July 2005, at fifty four. The Moon that day was at its last quarter and twenty one per cent lit, which is the phase that rethinks the premise rather than the details. Mars rules Aries, which makes it the ruler of his Sun, and that day it stood directly opposite his natal Moon at half a degree. Neptune sat opposite his natal Pluto at under a third, and Saturn stood square his natal Sun. The Sun itself had reached Cancer, water, against his natal fire. For a chart built on an exact agreement between identity and the planet of reach, the heavy planets arriving at hard angles to both of them is the sky the record closes under.