Quotes & Sayings About Ballads

I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably. — William Shakespeare

You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life. — Bob Dylan

I wanted to be in love like in the storybooks and songs and ballads. Love that hits you like a lightning bolt. And I'm sorry, because yeah, I get that you think I'm ridiculous. I get that you think I'm hilarious. I know, I get that you're mocking me. I get how stupid I am, but at least I know. — Holly Black

Entertainment in its broadest sense- popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-- has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them. — Michael Bronski

I'm not really good at writing sad sappy ballads. In terms of the lyrics not matching the vibe of the music, that's kind of the way my career has gone; everyone is a little confused about it all the time. — Mac DeMarco

That's what is so great about being able to record a 13-song album. You can do a very eclectic group of songs. You do have some almost pop songs in there, but you do have your traditional country, story songs. You have your ballads, your happy songs, your sad songs, your love songs, and your feisty songs. — Reba McEntire

Maybe you could put it out there that I don't have a built-in dislike of ballads. That was kind of the reputation I had back in the Seventies. But I've come around. Ballads have become something of an acquired taste. — Joe Perry

I have decided long ago that my songs and ballads would not get the hugs and kisses of the capitalistic experts. — Woody Guthrie

All of my favorite songs can bring me to tears. Some are rock, some are blues, some are love ballads. That's why I play music - to touch other people as I have been touched. — Kelly Blatz

He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess. — Michael Cunningham

There's a song for every feeling, Bee. Every tear, every smile, every heartbreak and every victory. Music ignites the soul and strips us bare. It's our very essence. Even if you have no one else to turn to and you feel all alone, remember that you can always find comfort in ballads and melodies, serenades and love songs. — Julie Johnson

In nearly all ballads, the words set the mood and meaning, while the music intensifies or enhances them. — Kate Smith

I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back? — Christina Aguilera

An uneventful, quiet life together is more my idea of a romance."

"Really? Oh. Well. It won't get you featured in any of the ballads though."

"Yes," he said, with a heavy sigh. "And that will be the great tragedy of my romance. — Sonal Panse

Many fairy tales and ballads present us with animals who are nobler, truer, and kinder than the greedy human beings who desire to possess them. I guess I tend to read these stories as very early (and possibly unconscious) feminist texts. — Delia Sherman

The song was wistful as the ballads Slidell and the Clayton brothers played, except words weren't needed to feel the yearning. That made the music all the more sorrowful, because this song wasn't about one lost love or one dead child or parent. It was as if the music was about every loss that had ever been. — Ron Rash

Even Soviet love songs were first and foremost propaganda, ballads of metalworkers or farmers who loved their country first and each other second. — Oksana Marafioti

I grew up in a household that was filled with Scottish and Irish ballads. So I think that the complexity and the melancholy and the languor of them has kind of gotten into my bones and that's the way I write. Now what does it contribute to my books? I don't know; I guess I would say that those are the kinds of books I like to read, books with vivid images and lots of mist and velvet cloaks and stuff. It's not as though I'm setting out to do that; it's just who I am. — Franny Billingsley

Some people resemble ballads which are only sung for a certain time. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

For a ballad's a thing you expect to find lies in. — Samuel Lover

Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old. You see, from the honky tonks you got such a mixture of all different types of music, and I think what happened is that when Elvis busted through, it enabled all these other groups that had been going along more or less the same avenue - I'm sure there were hundreds of them - to tighten up and focus on what was going to be popular. If they had a steel guitar they dropped it. The weepers and slow country ballads pretty much went out of their repertoire. And what you had left was country-orientated boogie music. — Peter Guralnick

And when power ballads come back, we'll get big hair again. — Jerry Cantrell

A lot of singers find a musical genre people like and stick with it. That's being a conformist. I sing ballads, rock, salsa, rap. — Thalia

I love a ballad in print o' life, for then we are sure they are true. — William Shakespeare

I should have known better than to trust a man who loved power ballads. — Jodi Picoult

I grew up singing ballads, but what I really wanted to get into was the mainstream music on the radio because I really love the beats and everything. — Jessica Sanchez

Actually when I'm depressed or feeling down, I seem to play quiet music and enjoy the time. So I listen to a lot of ballads and I try to enjoy the time with music. — Kim Tae-yeon

Some of my other heroes around that time were, oddly enough, Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole and people like that - I was always more inclined to listen to ballads. — William Bell

We are what ballads are written of, what bards sing of. We are epic, you and I. — Samantha Garman

I love karaoke. I love maudlin country ballads. In another life, I'd be Loretta Lynn. — Sam Taylor-Wood

I also plan to release a ballads collection. — Vinnie Vincent

Oscar Wilde said that "All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime," and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads. — Mark Forsyth

What's the deal with the bossman?" Urian asked him.
Alexion shrugged. "I don't know. He came in last night with a book, went to his room to read, I suppose, and then he came out here this morning and has been playing ... those songs ever since."
Those songs were ballads, which Acheron never played. God-smack, Sex Pistols, TSOL, Judas Priest, but not ...
"Is that ... " Urian physically cringed before he spat out the name, "Julio Iglesias?"
"Enrique."
Urian grimaced in horror. "I didn't even know he knew any mellow shit. Dear gods ... is he ill?"
"I don't know. In nine thousand years, I've never seen him like this before."
Urian shuddered. "I'm beginning to get scared. This has to be a sign of the Apocalypse. If he breaks out into Air Supply, I say we sneeak up on him, drag him outside and beat the holy shit out of him. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

So after he married her, he set out not really to woo her, which he thought would be cheating when affairs of state had almost forced them to get married in the first place, but to be as unflaggingly nice to her as he thought he could get away with. Their delight in each other after they became the sort of lovers that minstrels make ballads about (although it was certainly unpoetic of them to be married to each other) was so apparent that it spilled over into their dealings with their people; and the court became a more joyful place than it had been for many a long royal generation. And the minstrels did make ballads about them, even though they were married to each other. — Robin McKinley

Music lets you write your own checks. Don't ever forget that. — Jason Jack Miller

People call me for the ballads. Apparently that's where I've been pigeonholed. But it's really interesting and really fun. It's my favourite part of the job, writing. — Sia Furler

The true treasure lies within. It is the underlying theme of the songs we sing, the shows we watch and the books we read. It is woven into the Psalms of the Bible, the ballads of the Beatles and practically every Bollywood film ever made. What is that treasure? Love. Love is the nature of the Divine. — Radhanath Swami

I wish to go with you, not as man and wife, but merely as friends, travel companions, the sort of happy-go-lucky chums about whom rollicking old ballads of the road are written. — Alex Flinn

For a while, it was something to try to push at people, playing old murder ballads and being upset about everything I was seeing around me. But now I feel a lot more at peace with it. — Frank Fairfield

Here's how I'll tell you what I think - if you see white smoke then you know I picked a new pope. And if I'm drinking a Snapple then you know I don't give a shit. — Jason Jack Miller

We not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular
way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased. — William Wordsworth

I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I'm singing now is what makes the money. — Elvis Presley

Robin Goodfellow is a very old faerie. Not only that, he has ballads, poems, and stories written about him, so he is very near immortal, as long as humans remember them. Not to say he is immune to iron and technology-far from it. Puck is strong, but even he cannot resist the effects. — Julie Kagawa

My sound definitely pays a lot of homage to the Nineties, but not just the dance music. There's also breakbeats, R&B, the big ballads. It's that whole era infused with very modern sounds. — Kiesza

You can separate the men from the boys and ballads. — Coleman Hawkins

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads. — Miles Davis

When we do R&B midtempos or ballads, there's an Underdogs sound. — Harvey Mason Jr.

I subscribe to that school of thespian - to be a wandering minstrel or traveling player, a thing ofrags and patches, of ballads, songs and snatches. — Julian Sands

But Christian ... he was unique, a rose blooming in a frozen tundra.
Had Christian been a woman, he might have married a king. As a man, he could have any woman's bed, or all of them.
He could inspire ballads. He could inspire wars. — Eli Easton

I love ballads. I'm not into fast songs. I love to put my heart and all of my feelings into a song. — Leah LaBelle

From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me. — Cat Power

Hardy's astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also moves easily between the amplitude of dramatic monologue and the compression of imagism. He experiments continually with an ingenious variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes, rejecting the fluidity of contemporary poetry for his own idiosyncratic style, based on a real understanding of the variety of speech rhythms and registers. Each individual poem is designed to express in its language and form, and with utter honesty, Hardy's impressions of life. — Geoffrey Harvey

Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen. — Don DeLillo

My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic. — Frances Hardinge

The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age. — Lascelles Abercrombie

I love rock ballads, and I'm kind of in emotional turmoil, being ill and high, so I start to sing to the song, I turn it up and start to sing. — Nicolas Winding Refn

I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning. — Edward Hirsch

Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off. — Bonnie Raitt

She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'. — Joan Didion

I think it'd be great if Prince made an album of just romantic, slow ballads. — Moby

May your glass always be full, may there always be a roof over your head, and may you dirty sinners be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead. — Jason Jack Miller

Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music. — Pete Seeger

It's Coke, my man. You really think I'm going to let you pour any more alcohol into your body tonight? — Jason Jack Miller

A young musician asked Mozart, 'Herr Mozart, it has been suggested to me that I write a symphony. Would you be good enough to tell me how to go about it?' Mozart thought for a moment and gently suggested, 'You are still too young to write symphonies. Why not try ballads first?' 'You wrote symphonies when you were ten years old,' argued the young man indignantly. 'Ah, yes, but I didn't ask how,' replied Mozart. Absolutely. Mozart — Ashwin Sanghi

In his eyes I forget time, burnt diaries, midnight, and ballads. I forget that I am growing older. One day I will be an old woman. — Abigail George

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills - by destroying the American way of life. Radio — Louis L'Amour

Years ago, I wanted to be like the girl Ne-Yo. You know, with the mid-tempo ballads - I come from the Babyface era. But that's not trendy; that's not hip-hop. — Keri Hilson

If we hooked up, he could write me ballads and stuff. You gotta admit, nothing's sexier than a guy who writes music. — Becca Fitzpatrick

In Van Halen there were moments, like in some of the ballads, I put my heart and soul into those records. Those lyrics when I sang 'em, I gave myself goosebumps. — Sammy Hagar

True popular ballads are the spontaneous products of nature. — Francis James Child

I do ballads that say what every man wants to say and that every woman wants to hear, or I do songs about social issues. — Kenny Rogers

People who listen to my records expect the ballads from me. The rock 'n roll is on there because it's another mode of expression. — Dan Fogelberg

I've sung since I talked, when I'm two, but what I sang was ballads, because it's very hard to do a dance track with your little acoustic guitar when you're a kid. — Gloria Estefan

I'm glad people think I'm a badass. I'm a rock and roller, and I'm an R&B and a blueswoman. I don't do fairy music, although I love Celtic music and sensitive music. There's a balance between ballads and kick-ass songs. — Bonnie Raitt

Beware of singing divine psalms for an ordinary recreation, as do men of impure spirits, who sing holy psalms intermingled with profane ballads: They are God's word: take them not in thy mouth in vain. — Lewis Bayly

Henry,that's how you get rid of fleas. You keep them from laying eggs. You go to war with them. — Jason Jack Miller

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability. — Oliver Sacks

I'm not going to do a song that's really sad and thoughtful. Although I've done ballads like 'Dear Darlin',' I want to make them dance and be happy. — Olly Murs

Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time. — Henry Rollins

One thing all the way through the show to me is boring. I don't care how great the artist is. I find that if my audience is very young, and they want to hear very young songs, my show will be dominated by that. But there'll be some ballads here and there and some swing tunes. — George Benson

Kvothe continued, smiling himself "I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity's sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance." His smile broadened. "Mine. — Patrick Rothfuss

Some men are like ballads, that are in everyone's mouth a little while. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I started to write a lot of ballads that were sultry and had a Norah Jones-for-country kind of feel. I wanted to bring elements of old soul music and old country music. — Laura Bell Bundy

Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time ... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything. — Claude Debussy

In Poetry class, Professor Sappho teaches us how to compose love ballads. She's a swell teacher and all but I'm not sure I understand her. She's always going on and on about her weekend trips with the other goddesses to the island of Lesbos. — Tai

It's true, there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why, I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat. — Norah Jones

I have ideas of subjects and atmospheres that I love. I either want to go in a tougher, stronger direction or do the opposite: simple ballads. — Charlotte Gainsbourg

O sweet, sweet Joanna
How torn my heart!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
Our kiss shall never part!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
How thine eyes do mine miss!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
Lushest green now turned to mist!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
How wicked the under-lord king!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
Who stole our cherished ring! — M.L. LeGette

Well the country songs themselves are three-chord stories, ballads which are mostly sad. If you are already feeling sorry for yourself when you listen to them they will take you to an even sadder place. — Willie Nelson

I was too busy writing sad ballads to unrequited love in my head and planning a life where my hand would be my boyfriend. — T.J. Klune

Yeah, but a hellbender never dies. You ever see a dead one? — Jason Jack Miller

As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as 'castle' is a French loan word, for example; and the whole romance tradition comes from the French. But this sensibility, culture, and language becomes integrated with native culture.
As well as the beginnings of what came to be called a courtly love tradition, we can find in Early Middle English (around the time that Layamon was writing Brut) the growth of a local tradition of songs and ballads. — Ronald Carter

The faery lords are immortal. Those who have songs ballads and stories written about them never die. Belief worship imagination we were born of the dreams and fears of mortals and if we are remembered even in some small way we will always exist. — Julie Kagawa

Singing ballads whose words had never known paper but lived only on the rasping edge of their own voices. — Laini Taylor

Well, you can't throw heavy, analytical, thought-provoking songs at people 24/7. It's been my experience over the last 20 years that on a rare occasion, in a live setting, if you can slow people down to listen to two good ballads, then you're doing pretty good. Then throw a tempo at 'em. Then have fun. — Ronnie Dunn

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things
like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)
I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.
Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! — Terri Windling

You are not a handgun. More like a pellet gun. Maybe even a slingshot. — Jason Jack Miller

Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through, Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through. He'd lay in bed 'til the morning came, but the devil'd visit him just the same. Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through. — Jason Jack Miller

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. — H.P. Lovecraft