When the news of Burt Bacharach’s death broke on Thursday, I briefly wondered if I possessed a sixth sense. That morning, apropos of nothing but the vaguely sad Thursday feeling of wishing it were Friday, I’d had the urge to hear “In Between the Heartaches,” the ballad that opened Dionne Warwick’s 1965 album Here I Am. It’s a plaintive one, about a love that only seems to justify itself when no one else is looking (“They don’t know that in between the heartaches, you hold me here in your arms and say you love me…”). It also sounds a little like “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” fitting neatly into the vast catalogue of sad bops, if you’ll excuse the anachronism, that Bacharach wrote with lyricist Hal David over some 15 years. (Also see: “One Less Bell to Answer,” “A House Is Not a Home,” “Walk on By”…) I had turned to it often in moments of indefinite unease.
Not two hours later, upon learning that Bacharach had died in Los Angeles at the grand, old age of 94, I was audibly shocked, improbably disturbed. (Again: Ninety-four!) I wanted, needed, to be comforted. So, I did what anybody in my position would do: I pulled up my “Best of Burt” playlist.
I’d compiled many of its songs—which I mostly came to know in childhood, through my parents—in late February 2020, and then the next big batch in the thick of lockdown, which makes perfect sense in hindsight. Burt Bacharach’s music was, is, pure comfort food, the very definition of easy listening. That genre, such as it is, has developed a schlocky reputation over the decades, conjuring Kenny G (a very talented musician, by the way) and—what—a general unhip-ness? But what’s wrong with music that pairs well with a drink and a crackling fire; with music that is plainly very charming and, more often than not, incredibly beautiful?
Together with David (who died in 2012) and Warwick, his greatest collaborators, Bacharach forged a new sonic landscape for the 1960s; one that felt sophisticated but not alienating, accessible but not stupid. (In an obituary for the New York Times, Stephen Holden described Bacharach’s fusion of “the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration,” characterizing his mature style as “Wagnerian lounge music.”) Bacharach was an enormously gifted composer, and part of his gift was creating songs that went down easy, whether they were powerfully downbeat or about …raindrops falling on your head?
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