Word: ballads
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From the wistful ballad Fields of Gold to the insouciant rocker She's Too Good for Me, the lyrics wring pathos and irony from the misfortunes of unlucky lovers. Yet Sting's manners are too refined to let the suffering spoil the lush settings; the shackles in this emotional dungeon are lined with velvet. In Seven Days, pizzicato strings thrum a decorous, mocking waltz as a man muses over various ways to deal with a romantic rival. In the darkly cynical Love Is Stronger than Justice, a man kills his brothers to avoid sharing the affections of a beautiful senorita...
...cover of Rolling Stone, and his mother beat him to the cover of the Daily Racing Form, a newspaper about his other passion, horse racing. But he appears to believe he can catch up. After all, he was savvy enough to write a song called Brother, Brother, a ballad about a young man who turns to life on the street while his brother seems beyond reach...
Dicke portrays the victimized Audrey without making her seem like a hopeless caricature. Her touching ballad "Somewhere That's Green" is a hysterical list of simple dreams: "in a tract house we share...I cook like Betty Crocker and I look like Donna Reed..." Even dressed in fake fur and leopard skin and singing lines like "I know Seymour's the greatest but I'm dating a semi-sadist," Dicke manages to make us empathize with her plight...
...ruined when the jealous Marcus (baritone Timothy Nolen) reports him to the authorities -- the relationship sinks slowly into a morass of miserliness and sexual dysfunction. Driven nearly mad, McTeague kills his wife, steals her money and sets out for Death Valley, grimly pursued by Marcus: Wozzeck meets The Ballad of Baby...
...stage, and everybody knew what was next. As one, we started stomping our feet and chanting "Ween! Ween! Ween!" I've never been at a concert where everyone wanted the encore so badly. After a few minutes, Gene reappeared, holding his acoustic guitar, and began to play the ballad "Birthday Boy." We were swaying. Somebody held up a lighter. Then Gene stopped. "Shit, I forgot how this part goes. Oh, man." He tried a few chords. "Damn." Somebody from the pit climbed up on stage to help him figure it out, but it didn't work. "Anything else you wanna...