Immediate, Intimate, Intense Vocal Sound - How?

To save my life, I can't get the sort of sound I want for a project. Baritone male vocal, semi-spoken-word, almost slam-poetry vocal over music. Immediacy and intimacy in vocals in recorded music is one of the go/no-go issues for me and always has been. You know the sound: As if someone is grabbing you by the hair, looking you straight in the eyes and preaching directly to your soul from about 14" away from your nose. The wall separating the vocalist from the listener is gone. It seems to me that this requires a fairly low SPL, close-micing a LDC microphone and fairly high playback volume with the vocal upfront in the mix, but beyond that, I got nothin'. Assume nothing (such as my engineering experience or competence, as I have none) in your explanations; let's start from the plugging in the cable into the board and take it from there...what FX? What EQ? What secrets? Where's the magic? He'p a brother out!

Start with the right mic. Rather than a LDC, look for a large-diaphragm dynamic broadcast mic, like a Shure SM7.

Yep. Record as dry as possible, mic booth or something. I had some success using the blockfish as a compressor.

I use blockfish as well, it even has a preset called 'close up vocal' (you can find blockfish on kvr audio or other such website with free plugins). I would also make sure you have a decent pop-shield in place otherwise your Ps are going to wreak havoc on the end product.

Definitely have a decent area to track them in. And it doesnt have to be a mic booth - it can easily be an area that has much reduced reflections, without being surrounded 360... and obviously a place that is relatively quiet. various different mics are gonna have different sounds... from ribbons, to an sm7, RE20, or a u87... i don't think any one of these produces what you want for every voice. for male voice, i would try sm7 first however. Compression obviously... you might want to also compress the highs and raise them up a big that way, instead of eq'ing them.