![]() ![]() The title of his memoir refers not only to his early hit of the same name, written with the outstanding lyricist Hal David (Warwick’s 1963 rendition helped make David and Bacharach the go-to guys for what I call existential pop, songwriters who asked real questions about life and love) it also alludes to Bacharach’s own feelings of distance-his relative heartlessness-when it came to his daughter, Nikki.īorn prematurely in 1966, Nikki was autistic somewhat ironically and painfully, she couldn’t bear noise. Right there in the snow!” These flashes of glamour, Bacharach’s eye for feminine charm, and his ability to listen to female artists, to accept them, and shape them according to their and his specifications are part of what makes Bacharach’s 2013 autobiography, “ Anyone Who Had a Heart,” so enjoyable to read, along with the composer’s stories about his perfectionism in the studio and his inability to go the distance when it came to romantic love and family. and she’d be standing there wearing a Dior scarf, with a bottle of vodka, pouring me a drink. Sometimes she would call him on short notice, and he’d fly to Warsaw for a single show: “I’d walk down the stairs from the plane . . . In a 2015 interview, Bacharach said that Dietrich’s music “sucked,” but he liked her. It would be impossible not to learn from that consummate show woman if you spent enough time with her-she was so precise-and I’m sure that one of the things she taught him was that, if you had a limited instrument, as she did, you could still use it, you could still be expressive and controlled, in a way that listeners would want to tap into. Rather, he learned, I think, from working with performers like Marlene Dietrich, whose musical director he was for six years during the mid-nineteen-fifties and early sixties. ![]() Burt Bacharach, who died on February 8th, might have been the first to say that he wasn’t a great singer, not a superlative vocalist in the way that any number of the extraordinary women he helped become stars were, Dionne Warwick being the most obvious example. Might you listen to me? Just for a moment? He didn’t attack notes so much as glide over them, like a skater going around and around the ice in lovely circles. ![]() That hesitation suggested not shyness but invitation. The Martini & Rossi voice was real, a kind of breathy huskiness with a little hesitation behind it. ![]()
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