(Newswire.net — December 26, 2020) — While most rock bands spend their careers focusing primarily on up tempo tunes, every great rock band has a power ballad or two in their catalog. Often those power ballads end up being the most remembered song the band has.
The best rock ballads tap into something that everyone can relate to, either musically, lyrically or both. Quite often, these songs can trigger shifts in the music industry as a whole. Here are some of the rock ballads that changed the world.
1. “Yesterday” The Beatles
It is impossible to talk about rock acts changing the world without mentioning the Beatles. There may be no more influential band in rock history. “Yesterday” has been hugely influential since its first release in 1966. This song has been covered in every genre, more times than any other song in history.
2. “Stairway to Heaven” Led Zeppelin
Stairway is the archetypal power ballad. From its quiet acoustic intro and gentle lyrical opening, moving into a powerful chorus and bridge, “Stairway to Heaven” set a standard that almost every hard rock band to a ballad since then has tried to imitate.
3. “We are the Champions” Queen
This is quite possibly the perfect stadium rock ballad. Paired with “We Will Rock You”, “Champions” is one of those tunes that is guaranteed to get the crowd singing along.
Of all the Queen songs out there,this one may be the most popular with the largest cross section of the population. Love it or hate it, every high school football championship since the song came out would not have been the same without it.
4. “Alone” Heart
Heart was the first group that made a lot of people realize that women could do something other than just sing in the band. With Ann Wilson fronting the band with powerful vocals, her sister Nancy was able to shine on guitar.
After coming into their own with hard rocking songs like “Barracuda”, the group was able to slow things down while still keeping their rock edge instrumentally with this song.
5. “Home Sweet Home” Motley Crue
This song may not be earth changing by itself, but it is representative of a whole genre at its peak. The hard rock power ballad was never more popular before or since than it was in 1988. All of the 80s hair band rockers that had been doing over the top glam rock for the prior decade had to step out of their comfort zones to produce an MTV ready ballad, and this one set the tone for them all.
Without “Home”, we wouldn’t have had “Every Rose Has its Thorns”, “November Rain” or any other example of tough guy rockers showing their sensitive sides in black and white music videos.
6. “Heart Shaped Box” Nirvana
Nirvana defined the grunge era, so much so that when people want a shorthand term for the genre, they will sometimes just say “it feels like Nirvana”. Released on Nirvana’s second major label album, “In Utero”, “Box” manages to perfectly typify Kurt Cobain’s growly lyrical style and the band’s trademark poetically complicated and darkly obscure lyrics, while still staying below 100 beats per minute.
The rhythm of the track is faster than most ballads, but the lyrical line flows much more slowly than most songs of a similar tempo.
There have been 100s of other examples of tracks that could have qualified for this list. Great songwriters in every generation have put forward ballads that changed their genres in ways big and small. The next ballad to change the world is probably being written right now. Only time will tell! (That, by the way, is the title of a ballad that did not change the world).