What song is considered the first power ballad?
What defines a power ballad? Is it in the rousing lyrics? The emotional impact of the instrumental? The epic nature of the production? Arguably, it’s got to have all three, with the labelled essentially being made up when, one day, a song emerged that was both too powerful to be a typical ballad and too emotive to be counted as just a rock song.
The definition of what a power ballad actually is has kind of been workshopped over time. After the label first emerged, it evolved alongside the songs that have been allowed to be categorised as one. At first, it might have started off as just a way to describe that certain type of big, bold, yet distinctly emotional instrumental. However, as the playlist of songs attached got bigger, other factors came into play.
Lyrics play a big part. To earn the label, the song has to be, well, a ballad, which can be defined as either a sentimental song or, more traditionally, a storytelling poem with stanzas. A mix of the two is usually the way, with ballads typically having a narrative that drives all the emotion. But a power ballad has punch to it. It casts off the demand to be slow and sad, to instead give those introspective feelings a more extroverted delivery.
As the song, story, and emotions build, so does the instrumentation, usually climaxing into some big musical moment or a key change at the end that kicks it all up a gear. Think of all the great examples: Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’, Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’, Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’. They all hit a whole new level in the final third of the song as the emotions are heightened alongside the music for exactly the kind of punch that made that ‘power ballad’ label need to be invented.
But what song was the first power ballad?
No one knows who first coined the term ‘power ballad’. It’s uncertain when the genre emerged, but the sound seemed to spontaneously appear sometime in the 1970s, around the moment that Styx released ‘Lady’.
Released in 1973, the band’s epic and emotional love song ‘Lady’ is often considered to be the first power ballad. It also happened to be the first song that band leader Dennis DeYoung wrote for his wife, immediately ticking the box of the song needing to have a rich emotional centre and leading to him being called “father of the power ballad”.
“Lady of the morning / Love shines in your eyes,” he wails over a dramatic, theatrical rock instrumental, which ticks another box. This isn’t a classic rock song. Instead, it’s so clear that the music served the lyrics and the story of the song. The emotion comes first, and the rest works around it, allowing it to still be a ballad even if the music is more upbeat and rockier than the classics.
It’s no wonder critics at the time felt like they needed a new way to describe this song. A ballad wouldn’t have worked for instrumentation this epic, as it kicks into high gear with the chorus and only builds and builds with huge guitars and drums. But just calling it a rock song wouldn’t have done justice to its distinctly emotional power.
And so, a new genre was born. Encouraging more rock bands to indulge in introspection and dare to write more sentimental songs while still encouraging them to keep their sound big and bold, the new term let them find a golden middle ground between the heart and the desire to rock out.
