Power ballad

It is customary for crowds to hold up lit cigerette lighters during power ballads.

Power Ballad is the name given to a genre of songs that were frequently included on arena rock, hard rock and heavy metal albums in the 1970s and 1980s, though the style has evolved into more modern forms since.

These songs often explored sentimental themes such as yearning and need, love and loss. Their usually confessional nature differed from metal's more lyrical themes of hedonism, violence, or the occult. The term is partly a misnomer, as they are not so much ballads as love songs. In the years when record companies first considered the marketability of power ballads, they perhaps calculated that power ballad was more accessible and appealing than metal love song.

Format

Typically, a power ballad begins with a soft keyboard or acoustic guitar introduction. Heavy drums and distorted electric guitars don't enter into the arrangement until the chorus or even later in the song, in the more modern takes (Such as Creed's "With Arms Wide Open" or Evanescence's "My Immortal"). The electric guitar parts usually take the form of simple root/fifth chords which sustain until the next chord change, but screaming, melodic guitar solos are also important markers of this genre. The interplay throughout the arrangement between "clean" timbres and distorted ones is crucial to the creation of emotional tension in the power ballad aesthetic.

History

Power ballads initially came into popularity at the insistence of a record company in hope of scoring a Top Forty hit, and in the genre's formative years were written only grudgingly by band members. However in recent years, power ballads have been re-imagined (as has much of 1980s culture) as something "authentic" rather than something "manufactured" (i.e. pushed onto bands by record labels). For instance, VH1's advertising copy for its top-25 countdown show on power ballads states: "These bands had a fantastic sense for what their fans wanted. In most cases their record labels and managers didn't want them to do these songs." In any event, power ballads were often a band's most (or only) commercially successful songs. Because of the perceived superficiality of their sentiment, though, power ballads were consistently despised by music critics, who rejected the way metal musicians actively borrowed the musical codes normally reserved for more "authentic" styles of rock.

An important precursor for the form was The Carpenters' "Goodbye to Love" single in 1972, which featured a fuzz-tone screaming guitar solo (by Tony Peluso) in the middle of a "Middle of the road" vocal.

Power ballads originated in the 1970s with Power pop band the Raspberries and arena rock bands like Styx, Boston, REO Speedwagon and Journey. Early examples of power ballads are Don't Wanna Say Goodbye from the Raspberries' debut album in 1972, The Raspberries, and Styx's "Lady" from their 1973 album Styx II. As a solo artist, Raspberries lead singer and chief songwriter Eric Carmen continued to conribute to the genre by creating the #2 hit All By Myself in 1976, which was subsequently covered by artists such as Shirley Bassey, Celine Dion, and Il Divo.

Probably the first great power ballad (in terms of what power ballads would become for hair metal/pop metal (or glam metal), the genre in which power ballads were most important) is Foreigner's "I Want to Know what Love is."

Later development of the style from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s is exemplified by such hits as Scorpions' "Still Loving You", Dokken's "Alone Again"; and Skid Row's "I Remember You".

For some 1970s arena rock artists, the power ballad was also responsible for helping to revive their careers in the 1980s; examples include Heart's "These Dreams" and Cheap Trick's "The Flame". After the release of Guns N' Roses's Patience, the term power ballad started to decline in use.

The term "power ballad" is still used to this day in reference to songs such as Avril Lavigne's "I'm with You", Lifehouse's "Hanging by a Moment", Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You", or Velvet Revolver's "Fall to Pieces", and other such works.

Present Use

Occasionally, the term power ballad is applied more generally to earlier rock songs which start slowly and quietly and then gradually crescendo to a powerful, climactic end. This usage is far less common, however, and seems to be a retroactive application of the genre's name to pre-1980s album-oriented rock songs such as Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," and Aerosmith's "Dream On", which vaguely fit the power ballad aesthetic. Generally, a power (or rock) ballad is considered suitable for slow dancing because of its slow beat.

See also

* Lighter