BURT BACHARACH
Songwriting royalty (1928-2023)
BURT Bacharach made a nonsense of the easy listening category he was summarily lumped into. The stream of enduring classics that he composed, mostly in tandem with lyricist Hal David, were richly involved pieces with unconventional rhythms and harmonies, shifting time signatures and offbeat phrasing. Not for nothing did Frank Sinatra once liken his writing to hat sizes, all “seven and three-fourths”.
In his 2013 memoir Anyone Who Had A Heart Bacharach explained: “If a melody comes too easily to me, I don’t think it’s any good, so I turn it upside down and look at it in the middle of the night. A pop song is a short form, so everything counts.” His genius lay in making the complex palatable, spinning his ideas – gleaned from pop, jazz and orchestral music – into commercial gold.
Born in Missouri but raised in New York, he studied music prior to becoming Vic Damone’s pianist and conductor during the ’50s. He partnered with Hal David at the Brill Building later that decade, the duo breaking through with Marty Robbins’ “The Story Of My Life” and Perry Como’s “Magic Moments”.
