Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.
Would you believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. taught me how to sing a ballad? 'You can be in an arena,' he said, 'and you should be able to hold their attention.'
When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me.
Fergie will sing ballads to the dogs and they'll sit there rapt. You know your wife's a star when she keeps the dogs entertained for 20 minutes.
Some of my other heroes around that time were, oddly enough, Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole and people like that - I was always more inclined to listen to ballads.
My sound definitely pays a lot of homage to the Nineties, but not just the dance music. There's also breakbeats, R&B, the big ballads. It's that whole era infused with very modern sounds.
I started to write a lot of ballads that were sultry and had a Norah Jones-for-country kind of feel. I wanted to bring elements of old soul music and old country music.
In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
Kilroy," Jeremy said and the boy turned to face his father again. "Stand fast, boy," he told him. "Stand fast.
Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead.
The eye--it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where'er they be, Against or with our will.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect.
Something flickered in the distance, dressing the darkness in a soft veil of blue. Out of the blue came an explosion of sounds followed by the seamlessly expressed melancholy of Chopin’s “Ballade no. 1.
we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.
Years ago, I wanted to be like the girl Ne-Yo. You know, with the mid-tempo ballads - I come from the Babyface era. But that's not trendy; that's not hip-hop.
Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.
I kept writing all these ballads; they're me speaking about life. But how am I gonna do the live show I wanna do if I don't have something I can dance to?
At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.
I wanted to bring back that big, ballad type of music that we used to love so much. Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, when they first came out, that's what I grew up singing.
Well the country songs themselves are three-chord stories, ballads which are mostly sad. If you are already feeling sorry for yourself when you listen to them they will take you to an even sadder place.
It's true, there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why, I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.
