His ballads, often romantic, had vigour, conciseness, and uncommon evocative power.
It's in the blues and the ballads, often Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," that Davis's old suspense and edgy tenderness resurface.
Work songs like the early John Henry ballads, often rhythmic chants with no melody, set the pace and synchronized the movements of hammer man and shaker.
This tendency developed on one side into such works as the operatic play Nantaṉār Carittarak Kīrttaṉai by Gopalakrishna, and on the other into ballads, often based on the lore of the Sanskrit Purāṇas.
"Things are calm, yes, but it feels like the calm before the storm," said a local music producer who specialises in narcocorridos – accordion-driven ballads often commissioned by traffickers to glorify their exploits.
When he first came to England he was a media sensation in Georgian London, the subject of newspaper articles, poems and ballads – often satirising the extravagance and tortuous etiquette of the court.
With the alto saxophonist Justin Robinson, the pianist Ronnie Matthews, bassist Dwayne Burno, and the drummer Willie Jones, he tears through uptempo numbers and turns to the fluegelhorn for ballads, often the high points of the set.
His trumpet sound on ballads often had the low purr of a flugelhorn, and there were some transfixing unaccompanied passages from Virelles, whose solos were frequently full of dense trills and thundering chords that evoked an African drum ensemble.
Her songs are alternately sultry and manic — piano-based ballads often remade with patient and foreboding electronics.
Jon Caramanica of Blender viewed that Usher's songwriting "isn't a strength, and his ballads often drown in their own inanity".
