Word: balladeers
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LORI CARSON: SHELTER (Geffen). Sylvia Plath for the CD age. Carson is too insistently sensitive, but this is a debut record. Her ballad, Way of the Past, is a worthy postscript to a love affair; it might even be a route to a bright future...
...this incident, and it took Baerwald two years to get himself back in working order. But then -- and here life takes a sharp left away from art -- things started to come around. In 1988 Childs made a smash debut album, co-produced by Ricketts and featuring a beautiful, spooky ballad called Where's the Ocean. And Baerwald finished a solo project, his just released Bedtime Stories, that makes a worthy companion piece to Boomtown. That's what they call a wow finish...
...technique is always at the service of a sophisticated musical imagination that can make the instrument sound as if it were born to play jazz. Unlike a guitar, a banjo cannot sustain a note for very long. ("Pop, ping, and then it's gone," Fleck says.) Yet on his ballad Sunset Road, Fleck creates an illusion of satiny, legato plangency. If you want one word for the album, call it mellow. Says Tony Trischka, his former teacher: "Bela Fleck is making the banjo safe for mass consumption...
...ASCAP has asked us to handle product placements in popular songs. For example, a ballad called These Foolish Things is available that lists various items that ostensibly "remind me of you." For $20,000, the lyric "A tinkling piano in the next apartment" could be amended to "A tinkling Steinway . . ." and so on. (For an extra $20,000, the song's title could be changed to These Wise Investments...
...every musical is gutsy enough to make its big ballad the first words an audience hears, or to introduce both its other showstopper tunes within the next 20 or so minutes. But then few composers have the confidence in the spectator -- or maybe it's just the chutzpah -- to recycle the same few melodies over and over, in endless allusive variations, for nearly three hours...