Best ballad of all time

Peter Gabriel - Here Comes the Flood.

A ballad managed to bring tears to my eyes and goosebumps not so long ago (and that's no small feat), and has since become my favorite ballad : She is Everything by Spock's Beard on Octane.

  Moody Blues - Melancholy Man

THE WINDOWS OF THE WORLD, by Bacharach-David, as sung by Dionne Warwick.    

I'd have to say Still in Love With You by Thin Lizzy is the best one, at least the best rock ballad.

Thanks, RM. I appreciate that.

I know what you're saying, RM, and I have no problem with it at all, except that it's rarely acknowledged as being a strong component of the acts I mention. Instead they're time and again touted as the the top bands of Progdom, the modern saviors of Prog and/or an alternative to the mainstream.

They're just not, however much people might like them, because they're simply not Prog in all aspects - and I'm not talking about an occasional individual song that features mostly simple tonality and melody, but how it inevitably crops up even in the more complex epics.

They take some of the overt signs of Prog and marry them to very commonplace songwriting - I personally don't see the point of doing that, but if it's what floats your boat, great. My point here - and I was careful (at first) not to be too denigrating of the material itself - was that the connection was rather telling; a tolerance of power balladry and a love of these AOR-Prog acts.

Old classic Prog at its best featured both instrumental and structural trickery and songwriting with some depth (meaning melodies that go beyond Blues-pentatonic, that shift through different keys, use unusual phrasings and timings and that do not repeat the same melodic line over and over - more Gershwin than Jagger, more Bacharach than Chuck Berry, more Gilbert & Sullivan than CCR).

Given the choice of getting rid of one of those aspects, I'd rather dump the odd meters and trickery - much as I can love that - and just keep the intricate songwriting, whereas others obviously prefer the opposite.

RycheMan wrote: Wind of change is mainstream, so are 99% of the ballads that people have listed here.

True about that ballad, not at all true about what other (atleast not me) people have listed.

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