Word: balladic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...spread the treasure of her voice over thousands of songs and half a dozen generations, cutting everyone in on the wonder. There was something about her voice that glistened, that refracted off an up-tempo number like a sudden shot of sun or shone off a ballad like a sideling beam of moonlight...
Still, Fitzgerald had a lurking melancholy in her best ballad performances that pushed past the pristine technical perfection of her pitch and phrasing into the night country. As a personality, she was remote, needing music to give her substance. As a performer, even to someone hearing her for the first time, she was an old friend. Talk about Ella or Billie, and no further I.D. is required. "It used to bother me when people I didn't know came up and called me Ella," she admitted once. "It seemed to me they should say Miss Fitzgerald, but somehow they never...
...LEANN RIMES has loved and lost more times than Tammy Wynette. As it turns out, though, this Texas chanteuse is still at an age where heartbreak is a bad game of spin the bottle. Rimes, 13, is churning out teardrops across the country with her first single, Blue, a ballad originally written for Patsy Cline. Rimes' rendition has soared up the country charts, putting her in the company of idols like Wynonna Judd. "Everybody's starting to know who I am," Rimes says. But do fans believe she's 13? "No," she admits. "They want to see my birth certificate...
...album kicks off with Real Love, Lennon's dreamy 1979 ballad to which Paul, George and Ringo added sweet harmonies and rhythmic heft. There's also 12-Bar Original, a metallic-blues instrumental from 1965. Two other "new" songs are from that year: Paul's flaccid That Means a Lot, recorded as a demo for a single by P.J. Proby; and a Ringo vocal, If You've Got Trouble, with inanely taunting lyrics: "You think I'm soft in the head/ Well, try someone softer instead...
Some songs play like wrenching testimony given by a member of Humans Anonymous. In the devastating A Thousand Times a Day (another Nicholson ballad, this one written with Gary Burr), the speaker proclaims that she's given up cigarettes and booze. "Those were tough, this is easy,/And it feels so good to say,/ Forgetting you is not that hard to do,/I've done it a thousand times a day." Loveless performs the number at dirge tempo--if it were any slower it would be going backward--dramatizing all the dread resolve and the lingering uncertainty in saying...