Ms. O'Connor blazed out of Ireland in the late 1980s, had a worldwide hit with the Prince song "Nothing Compares 2 U" in 1990, provoked a furious backlash by tearing up a photograph of the pope on "Saturday Night Live" in 1992, and turned to other people's songs — standards, reggae, British folk ballads — between sporadic albums of her own increasingly devout works.
It starts out as a raw cheating ballad, flipping between wracked and defiant, its impact sharpened by being performed by just Parton and a guitar.
So she was rehearsing a mini-set that tucked her new single, the hymnlike ballad "Dark Road," between upbeat (but not necessarily cheerful) oldies dating back to her solo debut album, "Diva," and her 1980s albums with Eurythmics.
Nos 2, 3, 4 and 5 are taken up by a run of big ballads from between 20 and 30 years ago.
Popular ballads, written between 1690 and 1710, suggest that young females who cooled off in rivers or ponds were seen as legitimate sexual prey; swimming assumed an erotic charge.
The few uptempo songs are skeletal and abstracted, transparently displaying their underlying patterns of clicks and blips and nonsense pop syllables, while the ballads sway between two chords like Brian Wilson in a hammock.
Rarely less than bold and interesting, when it works Jukebox is electrifying: her reimagining of Hank Williams Ramblin'n' (Wo man' as a haunted soul ballad pitched somewhere between Portishead's 'Glory Box' and Aretha's 'Do Right Woman' is extraordinary; versions of Lee Clayton's 'Silver Stallion and James Brownn's 'Lost Someone' confirm she captures stillness better than almost anyone.
Happy medium between ballad and dance track (a wide spectrum).
During the first part of the ballad, Knowles alternates between the role of her flawed partner and that of the better man she would be.
Film writer Bill Craske likened the film to a blues ballad for its oscillation between uplifting humour and melancholic despair.
