Love Ballad

This R&B burner was the first single from L.T.D.'s third album, and it was their first hit, reaching #1 on the R&B chart and #20 on the Hot 100. The song finds lead singer Jeffrey Osborne crooning about an indomitable love that some people will never understand. The song is befitting for the group, whose name stands for Love, Tenderness, and Devotion.

This song was written by Skip Scarborough, who did vocal arrangements for the group Creative Source (a group assembled by Ron Townson of The 5th Dimension). He wrote it at a Bermuda hotel late one night when he was suffering from jet lag-induced insomnia. Scarborough says it took him just 20 minutes to write the song. Scarborough made the song gender-neutral so it could be sung by either a man or a woman, and he shopped it around, finding a taker in L.T.D., whose lead singer Jeffrey Osborne had filled in on drums and vocals on some Creative Source gigs.

There is no traditional chorus or hook to this song, which made it difficult to title. When Skip Scarborough wrote it, he referred to it as "Love Ballad," which is what he wrote on the lyric sheet. That name stuck, even though that title never appears in the lyric.