A few people I know have blog widgets that let visitors peek at the most recently-played songs in their iTunes queue. For me, installing such a widget would be humiliating, on par with admitting that I occasionally read The Baby-Sitters Club books in my spare time. (Oh, wait…) Still, I’ve decided to come clean and share my most recent procrastinatory obsession: Bad ’80s Love Ballads.

Ur-ballads—the heavyweights of the genre, the ones I put on repeat until I start to feel lightheaded—must have some combination of the following elements:

1. Shamelessly Gratuitous Key Changes. Admit it: you too get a tear in your eye during the triumphant final verse of Sergio Mendes’ Never Gonna Let You Go. Oh, the unalloyed earnestness! The way the key shift, like, mirrors the song’s emotional progression! Or something! Much to the delight of suckers like me, Mariah Carey and the Backstreet Boys kept the key-change torch burning well into the ’90s with gems like Can’t Let Go and I’ll Never Break Your Heart.

2. Shamelessly Gratuitous A Capella. The only thing that warms the cockles of my heart as reliably as the gratuitous key change is the gratuitous final-verse a capella chorus. Exhibit A: Eric Carmen’s Make Me Lose Control. (Vaguely related side note: I listen to Kansas’ Carry On My Wayward Son solely for the twenty-second a capella intro.)

3. Judicious Guitar Accompaniment. I like Stairway as much as the next person, but I remember people falling asleep during camp slow dances halfway through the 45-second guitar solo. Thankfully, many of Zeppelin’s Reagan-era successors nixed the extended hammer-ons in favor of the short-and-sweet approach.

To clarify, I don’t listen to stuff like Never Gonna Let You Go ironically. I drink it down, every drop. I’ll leave you to ponder what that says about me while I go back for another hit of Even The Nights Are Better.