How to EQ vocals to sound airy but not harsh? (Example included)

Question

An excellent example of this is here:

Owl City - If My Heart Was a House

Specially on the starting part of the song where you can hear his voice clearly, it sounded so light but full of presence. I know he high passed the vocals like crazy and probably boosted some on the 1.5K to make it sound like airy/radio-ish one. I tried to imitate this but my vocals ended up close to the target sound but it's sounding a bit harsh. Listen here for my attempt at the effect

And here's my EQ with that attempt

https://imgur.com/a/k3QjYRi

His vocals sounded a bit more "laid-back" even on the loud part of the song. How can I achieve something like this with eq?

Answer 1

if my sounds seem to be to harsh, I use smooth operator(vst).It's kind of a dynamic eq + comp. But if you have a higher budget you might want to check out soothe 2 or gullfoss or I think Ozones Sculpter does a simular thing... All of them detect harsh an "whistlely" (sry I'm german xD) frequencys in your audio and curve them out + dry wet or amount knob to mix it in. But Smooth operator is like the budged friendly version/ on sale for 30,- while the others are like 200,- Also White sea studio has good reviews of those on his yt channel :)