Near the end of the evening he sang "Can Heaven Wait," an aching ballad about a dying lover.
He called his friend Eric Bowley, and they recorded the song — an aching ballad called "Beauty in the Breakdown" — in a single afternoon in Bowley's basement.
The composers wrote an aching ballad, "Tuesdays, Thursdays," for Ms. O'Hara after she requested a song that would express all of Cathy's fury and frustration at her disintegrating marriage and her husband's callousness.
But the sly sense of humor always returns: near the end, there's an interlude called, "What You Want," in which a nagging lover's phone call provokes a brief, aching ballad of resentment.
Carly Thomas Smith moved things in a better direction when she infused the aching ballad "Pearl's a Singer" with genuine pathos, and better still was Monique L. Midgette's delicious "Hound Dog" (the "Big Mama" Thornton version) and her roof-rattling rendition, with the other three women, of "I'm a Woman".
Marco Antonio Solís performed his aching ballad (and the theme song for the telenovela "Teresa") "A Dónde Vamos a Parar?"— winner for Best Regional Mexican Song— amid a stage full of dancers unfurling parasols.
On the lovely, aching "Ballad of the Lights," Ginsberg, backed by Russell, describes Russell's habit of sitting by the Hudson River, looking out toward New Jersey.
Richie Unterberger of Allmusic noted his "hoarse, gritty vocals, brassy arrangements, an emotional way with both party tunes and aching ballads".
The Tindersticks specialize in odd, aching ballads full of unexpected details.
Yet he represents no one but himself, a perfectly idiosyncratic musician who has found himself at home in a spectrum of American music: country, blues, Tin Pan Alley, jazz and gospel, not to mention the aching ballads and genial traveling songs he has written himself.
Here they found audiences that embraced their tunes derived from aching ballads, labour songs and spirituals.
