Word: balladeering
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...British tabloids gave rave reviews for her good manners at Buckingham Palace. She charmed David Letterman and swung by the Today show to sing a love ballad penned for her husband, "Le President." Most importantly, Carla Bruni, a.k.a. Madame Nicolas Sarkozy, has won over the skeptical French public with a well-calibrated Gallic mix of dynamism and demure. Still, the First Lady of France has a major public relations problem on her hands, in the last place you might have guessed: her native Italy...
Most duets are blood-chillingly bad ("A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock and Roll" by Donny and Marie Osmond springs to mind), and doubtless the mosquito's mating song ranks high among such perturbations. But the identification of a particular love ballad performed by Aedes aegypti, the mosquito responsible for spreading dengue and yellow fevers, has one group of Cornell University scientists whistling happily along...
...Peggy Lee. Jo Stafford, who died July 16 at age 90, sang directly in the center of the note, and her sound was as clear as a Spanish town at noon. Stafford was also remarkable for the diversity of the material she tackled. She was one of the greatest ballad singers who ever lived, but she sang pop songs--her 1952 hit You Belong to Me sold 2 million copies--as well as folk music, country songs and novelty numbers. For a very successful period, Stafford and her husband, arranger Paul Weston (above, left), satirized popular singing under the names...
...Closer “All Your Kayfabe Friends” and the title track both twist in myriad directions, always threatening to dissolve into chaos while just clinging to some semblance of structure. The influence of Pavement on the band is clearer than ever on the beautiful lo-fi ballad “Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time.” (It even has two parts!) Some of the experiments toward the end of the album fall a bit flat, giving the impression that Los Campesinos! are trying a little too hard to push boundaries without any real concept of where...
...cops, they’ll steal your dreams and they’ll kill your prayers / Take a number where the blood just barely dried.” But this opacity comes at the cost of making sense. “Dustland Fairytale,” a badlands ballad about white trash, love, and God knows what else, features lyrics like: “Saw Cinderella in a party dress / But she was looking for a nightgown. / I saw the devil wrapping up his hands / He’s getting ready for a showdown.” Though...