ballad

Springfield: Well, “Right Here Waiting” is one those songs, the “Oh, my God, that’s just perfect, the perfect ballad.”

And she has been shortlisted for the country-adjacent ballad Please Please Please in the song of the year category, which is awarded for the craft of songwriting.

There’s also the crazed racket of “Motorbike Song” and the alluring ballad “Big Dreams,” written on acoustic guitar and matched in tone by a wistful music video directed by longtime collaborator John Angus Stewart.

The ballad was originally released as a Children In Need song in 2004 and topped the UK chart for two weeks.

Her slow-burning rendition of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “West Side Story” ballad — “my all-time favorite,” Jones told The Times in 2018 — is six minutes of lush orchestral jazz in which Franklin sounds as untethered as she ever did.