Word: balladeers
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Though enchanting, Am I Not Your Girl is not completely a bowl of cherries. The instrumental arrangement of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" is incongruous, But then so is the album. The requisite torch song, "Gloomy Sunday," is about suicide, and "How Insensitive" is a glacial ballad about those last beautiful moments of a relationship when you tear his heart into little pieces...
...slim vocal talents. Naturally, expectations were out of sight for Brown's latest solo outing, Bobby, which assembles the same producers as Cruel. The album, however, doesn't pack the wallop to distinguish it from other slick R. & B. records on the charts these days. Something in Common, a ballad Brown shares with his wife Whitney Houston is typical of the problem: short on juice but heavy on sap. New jack may not be exhausted, but right now Bobby is fresh out of new ideas...
...sure, he looked cool in those shades. As a musician, however, he was in way over his head. Of the two numbers he played, Clinton seemed more at home on Heartbreak Hotel; his growly sound suited the rhythm-and-blues genre, though his attacks were sloppy. Billie Holiday's ballad God Bless the Child was a mess. Clinton's phrasing was unsure, his tone thin, his melodic lines disintegrated into meaningless trills. But the audience loved it -- and maybe they were right. In a campaign dominated by sound bites, it is refreshing to hear a candidate come out with something...
...midphrase and to fill them with lyrics so clever they reward, and maybe require, repeated hearing. Like Sondheim, he is witty, wistful and wickedly funny. But Finn is readier to satisfy the playgoer's yearning for a hummable phrase. In Falsettos he gives every character a big ballad, ranging from the tender What More Can I Say to the abandoned wife's showstopper I'm Breaking Down to the AIDS patient's edgy, sardonic You Gotta Die Sometime. In all, the three dozen musical numbers add up to the richest emotional experience offered by any musical on Broadway...
...Junkies' lyrics describe the loneliness of travel and the heartache of lost hopes and broken dreams, but their message is one of strength rather than resignation. "Cowboy Junkies Lament," their ballad about poverty and troubled families, has an uplifting chorus: "Dark don't lie, dreams come true, all it takes is one or two/ Maybe just a few will see you through...