Perspective: How Burt Bacharach became one of the most celebrated American songwriters of the 20th century.
The melody soars at the opening before simmering into a brass line that can be described as nothing less than Bacharachian. Then Dionne Warwick delivers a series of rhythmic touchstones on the beat with Hal David’s lyrics — “when I’m” — that roll into the chorus. And that chorus? Deliciously catchy and not because it’s simple, predictable or, dare I say, easy.documenting his work with Bacharach, these were hard songs to pull off.
when he agreed to do his first Instagram Live on The Washington Post show I hosted during the pandemic. We chatted about Fauci and face masks, his bedtime but soon got to the heart of the conversation. How does he write? “Those lyrics were going to have to say what was going on in that motion picture, without giving everything away,” he said. “So Hal David wrote all the lyrics first, and then I wrote the music. It was a very difficult song to write: Six-bar phrase. Eight-bar phrase. Twelve-bar phrase and all rules are off. You know, you just follow where those words take you. So it took me three weeks of writing the melody on that. I am very hard on myself when I’m working because it’s inch by inch.
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