Updated at 11.44pm AEST Facebook Twitter Google plus Share Share this post Facebook Twitter Google plus close 7.56pm AEST10:56 Powering through to the power ballad.
Happy, the stately ballad and second single to emerge from her forthcoming third album, Froot, is a case in point.
There is too, a sense of yearning in the album, which includes a Johnny Cash-like ballad about the women's prison, Holloway Jail, and blues about never going "anywhere south of Delaware, never saw a Kentucky moon".
He did, however, prove himself to be fairly adept at the Q-shaped plinth he'd been plonked on, shooting down the tail whenever he wanted to look earnest, like U2 during a ballad.
At Thursday's semi-finals – sporting high-heels, butterfly eyelashes and a full beard – the drag queen was greeted with loud cheers, and the bookmakers are now predicting her grandiose ballad Rise Like a Phoenix could go for the win.
Currently, Smitten-Downes's main competitors among her 25 fellow contestants are Sweden's Sanna Nielsen with her power ballad Undo, as well as Austria's Wurst who has already captured Europe-wide attention.
According to Feehily, the laws of the Westlife ballad were a source of fond amusement to the band as much as to their detractors.
Co-written by Jamie-Lynn Spears (sister of Britney), the wistful ballad looks back on a high-school relationship that burned hot and then went awry.
Heavy on the ballad and the emotional lyric, typified by fiddles, guitars and harmonicas, country music has its roots deep in the Appalachian mountains from where it emerged in the 1920s, but its origins were also heavily influenced by traditional Celtic ballads from Scotland and Ireland, brought to the US by immigrants from Europe.
It includes exponents of urban hip-hop, melodic rock, retro-country, guitar band anthems and even the power ballad.
We wondered – plucking several descriptions out of thin air charged with electric ions – whether we should proceed by labelling it folk noir, avant-acoustica, ballad oscuro, Nico in trip-hop hell, or susurrating 21st century shadowplay?
