Pop Ballads that mean a lot to you

tough one. old goodies: Mariah Hero, Christina Beautiful, but those are like played out

i'm terrible at figuring out what constitutes a ballad anymore

i) abjection - the expression of futile hopes and the narrator stripping themselves of all dignity, usually pleading for someone to come back. mariah's 'we belong together', all saints' 'never ever', toni braxton's 'unbreak my heart'. mostly sung with an awareness of how...unhealthy and undignified all this soul-baring/prostration before someone who's walking away is, and much of the emotion is the thrill of crossing that line.

ii) sealed-dyad commitment, us against the world. rihanna's 'umbrella'.

iii) greg said once that all great ballads are secretly bangers and vice versa...'unbreak my heart' is a great example!

i should stay away from this thread til i'm not at work and can post coherently

does Cassie's 'Ditto' technically qualify as a ballad?

Sugababes - "Ace Reject"

This song has become immensely important to me over the last year or so, for reasons i can't necessarily pin down.

One of the things that makes (made?) the Sugababes well-equipped to do big, epic, lifechanging pop ballads is the really clear differentiation of their voices, which comes through very strongly in this tune. In fact apart from the chorus, the three girls sing entirely different melodic lines - Mutya does this kind of depressive, resigned verse/bridge, and as it so often does her refusal to adorn her vocals comes across as a kind of wisdom, she sounds so much older than she is, like this is the final chapter in not just a love song but some epic in which two lovers are kept apart not by fate but by their own choices, their own betrayals. Then Keisha swoops in with an entirely different verse/bridge that is much higher and almost cathartically frustrated, and yet very pure - Keisha always sounds cosmically right in such songs, like she's the voice of the relationship as well as a voice in the relationship.

Heidi gets a bit shortchanged on the middle-eight, partly because it's such a typical place for her, and partly because she sorta sounds distant and multitracked, subsumed within the song's expression of fragility rather than offering her own stamp on it. But it's a great middle-eight, so camp in its melodrama, which really of the three only Heidi can pull off - that quiver she puts into it is perfect. Heidi's vocals in these songs always give me a "slowly rotting away in a decadent but lifeless celebrity relationship" kinda vibe, I imagine her in a white dress in a white room eating a plate of spaghetti with pesto, all alone (also she gets the great first verse in the next song "2 Hearts").

Underneath it all the slightly ska groove pretty much does not change at all, just accumulating airy synth and guitar layers like a stick accumulating fairy floss. The chorus is as pop as anything the group ever did, and it works really well, its overt repetition matching perfectly the repetition in the lyrics ("We break up to make it up/back and forth we never stop/every time a change of heart/can't keep up"). The formula of the chorus might not work if the verses (particularly the first) were more straightforwardly complicit with it, but instead the song works on a split level in a reverse of what you would expect: the verses are outside the drama of the relationship looking in, effectively an expression of the intervention, whereas the chorus is the relationship itself, unchecked and uncheckable, all the reflection of the verses lost.

The song is a depiction of a relationship at the breaking point, but when I'm not focusing on it, but simply listening, the story of this song is not about an actually existing relationship but a relationship-to-come, a complicated love letter to someone the singers haven't met. It makes me sad because I wonder, somewhat incoherently, if this is the best they can hope for.

oh tim you just reminded me, speaking of relationshps breaking

Chicago, If you Leave me Now

Nothing gets me like that. Nothing.

Did I ever talk about Girls Aloud - "Singapore"?

This is not really a ballad except that it has a dewy chorus and it's about a long distance relationship. I love the stridency of the vocals. Again it helps that the verse melodies are entirely different (Xenomania did both this and "Ace Reject" BTW). The chorus has one of my favourite love song lyrics ever I think: "Dark streets only suffocate me now/you're off to Singapore/Heart aches, God, it nearly breaks each hour/I'm waiting for your call".

There's something so architecturally brilliant about that, although I guess you have to hear the melody to understand completely.

I guess what this thread is about is that I totally wanna write this kind of song "when I grow up"

Would something like "To The End" by Blur count? That would be mine, or their bside, "Theme from an Imaginary Film."

Tim F OTM about the Sugababes ruling at pop ballads - although "Ace Reject" personally does nothing for me, most probably due to the lifeless ska groove.

"Too Lost In You" does it for me though because it is so emotionally over the top, due I'm sure to Diane Warren's involvement - but her work is matched with the Sugababes' distinct voices. I love how it starts off relatively restrained but progresses to a climax where they all become just a little histrionic - Keisha's Baby baby baby baby - is sublime. I guess I like my Sugababes ballads to be mega, although the ones with Siobhan were fantastic too.

Also I hadn't seen the video until very recently - and that ruined it for me because it's totally oversexed, which doesn't really fit the song, even though the men are hot.

Other great ballads:
Girls Aloud "Deadlines & Diets"
Rachel Stevens "Nothing Good About This Goodbye"
V "You Stood Up"
Kelis "Get Along With You"

Fuck, how can I forget Shakira's "Underneath Your Clothes"? The way she enunciates "being suuuccch a goooooood girl, hah..." differently throughout the song is unimitable - different degrees of carnal and desperate as the song progresses. It kills me everytime. Also, it's impossible to not sing along to.

Also, Fineformusic, have you heard the version of "To The End" they do with Francoise Hardy? It's miles better even though the original is one of my faves already.

<livejournal>
"more than a woman" by aaliyah
this song was really important to me in the fall of 2001.
very eerie, transparent and shimmery for chart r&b, it became popular right after aaliyah died, and right around september 11th, when i was living in a dorm down by the financial district - it wasn't a huge hit really, but hot 97 played it pretty steadily as she had just passed away. it would make me cry everytime. turning on hot 97 when i heard sirens helped to stop panic attacks. i was seeing this boy, and i made him switch his clock radio to hot 97 so there was listening in bed (he listened to the Z100 morning zoo before, YUCK), cuddling, dumb jokes, he says he still listens to to the station in the mornings because of me (i don't really, as it's crap now) and one time he skateboarded to my dorm and brought me flowers. it was an intense but also distant and closed-off relationship - this song brings me back to this time in a very immediate way.
</livejournal>

Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time"
Has that hopeful yet resigned vibe ... the lyrics stutter and stop unexpectedly with a halting flow ... she's trying to verbialize the emotions through symbolic situations without fully realizing their significance. The message is very mixed which makes it all the more powerful. The very beguiling chorus promises loyalty while at the same time infering the relationship has passed.

"Nothing Good About This Goodbye" is great, although it only really picks up after the first verse. Rachel Stevens' version is much, much better than Alexis Strum's original though.

Some other wonderful pop ballads:

'Never Had A Dream Come True' by S Club 7 (I can't believe this hasn't been beat to death on American Idol)
'Whole Again' by Atomic Kitten (the version with Kerry Katona doing the spoken bit-very important!)
'Never Ever' by All Saints (the spoken bit of 'Never Ever' drags a bit, but it's still completely necessary)

An obvious choice is "Angels"...I remember requesting it on every radio station and listening for hours at a time so I could record it off the radio (obviously this was pre-Napster). It wasn't a big chart hit in the US but I suppose it's one of those songs that everyone here knows by now. Another track I'm surprised hasn't been done on AI.

I warmed up to "Ace Reject" a lot, although the "ska" part sounds like a video game interlude, if that makes sense. What's great about Mutya's part is the lazy way she sings it...she drawls it, dropping her Rs and so on. It's terrific. "Follow Me Home" is another great Sugababes track, the version with Mutya, though, not the single version with Amelle. I'm not a huge fan of "Too Lost In You," but I really do like "Stronger".

"Underneath Your Clothes" bugs me because it sounds too much like "Eternal Flame," which I would also include on my list of favorite pop ballads.

It's all about melody, as usual in my case. Although in the case of ballads it is even more about melody/harmony and nothing else, as fancy production tricks, stereo effects etc. work better with faster songs.

Examples are some of Paul McCartney's best songs, but also Crowded House's "Four Seasons In One Day" which is the best song Neil Finn ever wrote.

Using pop here as meaning pop, not just recent manufactured teenybopper stuff.

This used to be an interesting thread.

Eternal Flame!!