A lot of my solo albums were produced by different people who had their idea of what songs I should do, and they had me doing a lot of ballads.
Aaron Neville
The study of folklore is largely the study of particular folklore genres: myth, folktale, legend, ballad, proverb, riddle, superstition, etc.
Alan Dundes
The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
Alan Lomax
I get to work a lot of times in nightclubs and large theaters, so I wanted to make music that is fun to perform in those settings. But I also wanted to contrast it with really serious, sincere ballads.
Alaska
The main thing for all of us was having a ballad, a slower song. Finally, they get to hear more of a vulnerable side to us! We didn't really have that in 'Reflection,' and that's something we all fought for.
Ally Brooke
I'm kind of a pop balladeer because I love the art of storytelling. I call myself 'HBO for the ears'; I sing little movies.
Amanda McBroom
I wrote a song with Kara DioGuardi called 'What If,' and it's a really beautiful song. It's kind of like a rock ballad. There's a lot of guitars and drums in it.
Ashley Tisdale
I have been listening a lot to The Carpenters and Neil Diamond, Elton John, and thinking, like, 'God, it'd be great to write a sort of subversive, alternative ballad,' like Lou Reed does so well with 'Perfect Day.' And I really loved 'Video Games' - at the time, it hadn't really got as big, but it's a classic song; you can't deny it.
Bat for Lashes
The mistake British comedians often make is trying to beat the Americans at their own game - getting visiting American singers on their shows, talking about 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement,' sitting on high stools in a white dinner jacket doing ballads. That way, you simply end up with a mid-Atlantic mishmash.
Benny Hill
The first and last song I ever wrote was a ballad I was quite proud of, and one I would play for anyone, anywhere.
Bert Kreischer
I'm a really new artist here. I would say that my style is an artist who can dance and sing. That's why my album is really upbeat. Maybe we will try slowly to do ballads or middle tempo songs.
BoA
You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.
Bob Dylan
Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.
Bonnie Raitt
My love was Bob Dylan, but as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad.
Even on the most serious ballads, I'll throw in a tongue-in-cheek remark.
Brad Paisley
I would say I am one of those people who just love to connect to people doing something I love. Can't lie, love a ballad, so expect big, powerful, emotive stuff from me!
Calum Scott
From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.
Cat Power
I tend to gravitate toward ballads and mid-tempo songs.
Charles Kelley
I do appreciate the '80s as an era, the general sounds and aesthetics of the era. The Cure, that whole kind of image is really kind of amazing, I think. The power ballads and how everything sparkles and words are really dramatic. Huge drums, things like that. I do really find it inspiring.
Charli XCX
When I was making my second record, I was in studio, and I was like, 'No more ballads! Absolutely not!' And somebody walked in with 'The Man I Wanna Be' and I heard it and was like, 'Ah, crap!'
Chris Young
A ballad once in a while doesn't go amiss.
I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?
When I started writing material, I realised you could take a ballad like Usher's 'Nice and Slow,' sing the same melody over a garage track, and everyone would be up and dancing.
Classical pianist Awadagin Pratt. I first heard this eccentric and introverted performer when I was living in the Midwest. He was playing Brahms ballades - haunting.
The worst thing for me when I go to a concert is a whole bunch of ballads. You get bored.
When I'm playing live, I'll rip out a ballad from my album, and I'll play that solo on the piano, which feels really good because it kind of takes me back to when I was younger.
So I did 'Something Happened on the Way to Heaven' and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad.
When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me.
I don't just do power ballads. I have a lot of up-tempo stuff, too - like 'Can't Fight the Moonlight.'
The new material includes a Latin-flavoured song, some electric rock songs, and a ballad. Something strikes me, and I follow that. I'm as excited now as I was when I was 15.
There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.
Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.
I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.
I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I'm singing now is what makes the money.
I am a balladeer. People fall in love to ballads, and that is what makes the world go round.
I was known as a ballad singer who sang melodramatic heavily produced ballads. I'm not known as a mid-tempo singer who does fun songs. I'm not going to do a song like 'Dancing on the Ceiling.'
When the second album came out, everybody gravitated immediately to the three and a half minute rock tunes and ignored the ballads. They thought all the Raspberries were was players of high-energy rock songs.
I always wrote ballads, and I always wrote rockers.
Half the people tell me, 'I love 'Go All the Way,' but why do you have to write all those schlocky ballads.' And half say, 'I love 'All By Myself,' but why do you waste your time with this rock 'n' roll stuff?' I'd like to think that I could do both.
The Raspberries had recorded some ballads on every one of our albums, but after 'Go All The Way' was successful Capital pretty much wanted to hear nothing but 'Go All The Way.'
I think up until the 'Honestly' album it was very much label-company lead, of 'this is a sound that we need, this is what you need to do. You need to do ballads, you need to do a million different types of love songs,' and I hate ballads and I hate love songs.
I remember in 2016 when I got signed to my record label Good Soldier, which is a very small indie label. They took a big risk on me because ballads were the furthest thing from cool at the time.
We started playing 'Free Bird' in clubs, and initially, it was just a slow ballad.
One thing all the way through the show to me is boring. I don't care how great the artist is. I find that if my audience is very young, and they want to hear very young songs, my show will be dominated by that. But there'll be some ballads here and there and some swing tunes.
Nothing Rhymed,' my first single in England, was a nice ballad, which I thought would sound like a songwriter typical of the day - denim, jeans, long hair, early 20s.
Would you believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. taught me how to sing a ballad? 'You can be in an arena,' he said, 'and you should be able to hold their attention.'
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.
I dated someone in the '90s who was really into Metallica, and I remember thinking at the time, 'That just sounds so heavy and hard.' But they have great ballads! Great ballads.
When we do R&B midtempos or ballads, there's an Underdogs sound.
