“Easy listening” he could live with. “I’d rather that than ‘elevator music’,” Burt Bacharach told me one time. The joke, he knew, was on anyone who tried to play the stuff.
You might get your fingers across his impossibly lush, elegantly stacked chords and your brain around the changeable time signatures. But God give you strength to nail the pitch of the emotion inside those immense melodic arcs – lightly now, don’t get cheesy – while making it all feel like you’re only telling the story of your life.
“You take a song like Anyone Who Had a Heart, and you tell me that’s easy listening? You gotta be kidding,” said the man who wound up producing his own records “in self defence” after too many formulaic hitmen messed up the more subtle measures of his magic.
“Hold it up to the light and you see it’s not ‘easy’ at all,” he suggested gently. “But if you wanna call it that, hey, be my guest.”
Bacharach died on Wednesday (US time), aged 94. Here are eight of his best.
Alfie
The song he often cited as a personal best is a hard-truth conversation with someone who isn’t listening, wrapped in a tune that seems to be making itself up in escalating desperation as its subject turns away. Pleading and accusing, juggling reason and sympathy and ultimately pitching itself into failing hope, its question is a time bomb for every human being whoever wonders. So, when Cher got it wrong, Burt called to let her know.
24 Hours From Tulsa
You can’t talk about Bacharach without mentioning his lyricist, the late Hal David, but the composer famously wouldn’t budge a finished melody for an errant syllable. His hesitant, southern cantina tune hence hatched this masterpiece: a Dear John(ette) letter slow-dancing a jukebox romance that can barely face the heartbreaking realisation of its own chorus. Find the great Chris Wilson’s version if you can.
Anyone Who Had A Heart
The technical challenge, for time signature nerds, is the shift from 5/4 to 4/4 to 7/8 in the chorus. The gift for the singer is how that rhythm plugs you into the held breath of the crushed lover: Indignant, enraged, and utterly devastated in a handful of choking phrases too proud to break down and sob. Just.
This House Is Empty Now
Elvis Costello had to curb his trademark verbosity to fit the hollow shell of a man sifting through the detritus of a marriage, trying to track the course of his own delusion. What critics of his overreaching vocal missed, he said, was that the maestro had written a tune that was “pretty much impossible for anyone to sing.”
This Guy’s In Love With You
Buh-buh, buh-buhm. What else could fit that tune? The tongue-tied guy of the title practically stutters the most eloquent melody in the book like he’s floating in a slow-motion lovestruck stupor, time suspended in an eternal moment of promise. Far too besotted to be kitsch, the Reels’ version is an unlikely Australian classic.
The Look of Love
The ultimate horizontal bossanova was Bacharach’s attempt to capture the erotic allure of Ursula Andress on screen. Tick. Dusty Springfield sounds like she’s singing into a satin pillowcase. Even the saxophone solo is half-dressed, perched on the room service tray with wet hair and a towel wrapped around its waist. If a song could blush, this is the colour.
Do You Know the Way To San Jose
The song that explains why Dionne Warwick was Bacharach and David’s interpreter of choice, sung at the wheel of a pale blue convertible cruising Sunset with oversized sunglasses, a fluttering headscarf and a knowing smirk for all the other wannabes coming the other way. Or at least that’s how it sounds. “It’s a dumb song and I didn’t wanna sing it,” she famously said. Yeah, but just try not to.
Bacharach during an interview in Los Angeles in 1979.Credit:AP Photo/Huynh, File
What The World Needs Now (Is Love)
“I’ve been writing love songs all my life, never rocking the boat,” Bacharach wrote in 2006. “The closest I came to writing music with any social and political connotation was What the World Needs Now is Love. When that song was written 40 years ago, it was an important song. And, now, it is a thousand times more so.” Stick that hard truth on your easy-listening playlist.
