Burt Bacharach

Burt Bacharach is the most harmonically sophisticated songwriter in the history of American pop — the figure who brought Ravel, Debussy, and Brazilian bossa nova into the three-minute single without sacrificing emotional accessibility. His partnership with lyricist Hal David and singer Dionne Warwick produced a body of work that expanded what pop music could be structurally: songs in 5/4 and 7/8 time, melodies that leap across wide intervals, chord progressions that modulate through unexpected keys, arrangements that use orchestral color with the precision of classical composition. That these songs were also massive commercial hits (played on transistor radios and jukeboxes, sung along to by people who couldn’t name a time signature) is the proof that complexity and popularity are not enemies.

Training and the Brill Building

Bacharach grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, a jazz-loving teenager pushed into piano lessons he resented. The training took anyway. He studied composition seriously, most consequentially with Darius Milhaud of the French group Les Six, at the Music Academy of the West in California.¹ When the young Bacharach handed in a sonatina with an unfashionably pretty slow movement and felt embarrassed it wasn’t dissonant in the avant-garde manner of the day, Milhaud told him never to be ashamed of writing something a person could whistle, a line Bacharach cited for the rest of his life as the permission that made a pop career possible.² After two years in the Army he worked as a nightclub accompanist, and from 1958 to 1961 he served as musical director for the actress and chanteuse Marlene Dietrich, writing exacting orchestral charts for a demanding performer night after night.³ That discipline was the direct training ground for the meticulously scored pop records to come. In 1957, in the Brill Building, a publisher paired him with the lyricist Hal David; their first hits — “The Story of My Life” for Marty Robbins and “Magic Moments” for Perry Como — arrived almost at once, four years before the singer who would complete the team.⁴

Influences and inheritance

From that training Bacharach absorbed the harmonic language of French impressionism — whole-tone scales, augmented chords, modal ambiguity — and joined it to jazz (particularly cool jazz voicings), Latin music (bossa nova’s rhythmic sophistication), and the Great American Songbook tradition he inherited and extended. At the Brill Building he brought this formal training to bear on pop songwriting, working within the same professional system as Gerry Goffin and Carole King but writing music that was harmonically richer than almost anything else in the building.

Core musical identity

His arrangements carry as much of the song as his melodies do. He scored his own recordings, writing string and horn parts with a specificity that left nothing to chance. The effect is warmth wrapped around intelligence: “Walk on By” sounds effortless, but the melody’s wide intervals are genuinely difficult to sing, and the bossa nova rhythm sits under a harmony that keeps modulating through new key areas. You feel it before you understand why. The harmonic motion depends heavily on borrowed chords from parallel minor modes, the shifts between major and minor coloring the emotion without announcing themselves.

The rhythm is where the sophistication hides in plain sight. “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (1963) slips from 4/4 into 5/4 and out through a 7/8 turnaround; “I Say a Little Prayer” (1967) runs a verse that quietly adds a half-bar and a chorus in 11/4.⁵ By Bacharach’s own account none of it was deliberate: “It wasn’t intentional, it was all just natural. That’s the way I felt it.” The extra beats fall exactly where a singer would pause for breath, so the ear never counts them, and both songs were Top 10 hits whose listeners never suspected they were singing in odd meter. That is the whole argument of his music in miniature: the difficulty is real, and it is hidden.⁶

The Bacharach–David–Warwick triangle

Bacharach found his ideal interpreter by accident. In 1961 a young backing vocalist named Dionne Warwick sang on a Drifters session for one of his songs; struck by her voice, he and David hired her to cut demos and then signed her to Scepter Records.⁷ She could read music and had come up singing gospel, and she could land the leaps and meter shifts that defeated lesser singers, which made her effectively the third member of the team. Their first single named her by accident: after Bacharach and David gave a song she had expected to a male singer, Warwick snapped “don’t make me over, man,” and David turned the phrase into a plea for acceptance.⁸ “Don’t Make Me Over” (1962) launched a decade-long run of some three dozen chart singles⁹ — “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk on By,” “Message to Michael”, “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” — David’s plainspoken lyrics (“the moment I wake up, before I put on my makeup”) grounding melodies that were anything but plain.

Key records

“Don’t Make Me Over” (1962) — The triangle’s first single, born of an offhand outburst; the record that found the Warwick voice
“Anyone Who Had a Heart” (1963) — Warwick’s first Top 10 and the clearest specimen of the method¹⁰: 4/4 into 5/4 and out on a 7/8 turnaround, all of it felt as natural breath. In Britain, Cilla Black’s cover went to No. 1 while Warwick’s original stalled, an early case of a British act outselling the American soul record beneath it¹¹
“Walk on By” (1964) — Nearly a B-side until a disc jockey forced the flip; two grand pianos and a flugelhorn under a melody that aches¹², a song about holding composure through heartbreak. Isaac Hayes later stretched it to twelve minutes on¹³ Hot Buttered Soul
“I Say a Little Prayer” (1967) — The odd-meter hit later reharmonized into a gospel-soul anthem by¹⁴ Aretha Franklin
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) — His most famous film score, home to “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”: four weeks at No. 1 and an Academy Award¹⁵, pop songwriting at its most effortlessly charming
Promises, Promises (1968) — His Broadway musical, the meter experiments carried onto the stage in a score¹⁶ so tricky to play nightly that he policed its conducting like a control freak

After the triangle

The partnership broke almost as suddenly as it had formed. The 1973 film musical Lost Horizon was a costly flop — the New York Times called it “a big, stale marshmallow¹⁷” — and in its wake Bacharach, who arranged and produced everything, asked David for a larger share; David refused, and the writing relationship ended.¹⁸ Bacharach then failed to deliver albums he owed Warwick, who sued, and the triangle dissolved into lawsuits that left her without hits for years. “After Lost Horizon opened,” Bacharach said, “I disappeared from Hal, I disappeared from Dionne and I disappeared from my marriage.” He spent the rest of the decade in a commercial wilderness before a second act with Carole Bayer Sager in the early 1980s (the chart-topping “Arthur’s Theme” and “On My Own”, the AIDS-benefit¹⁹ “That’s What Friends Are For”) and a late, admired collaboration with²⁰ Elvis Costello on Painted from Memory (1998).

Legacy and influence

Bacharach’s harmonic language infiltrated pop music so thoroughly that it became part of the vocabulary. The Beatles covered his “Baby It’s You” on their debut album and absorbed his approach to chromatic modulation.²¹ Brian Wilson studied his arrangements.²² The sophisti-pop of the 1980s (Sade, Everything but the Girl, Prefab Sprout) drew directly on his elegance; the indie pop of the 1990s and 2000s²³ (Stereolab, the High Llamas, the Divine Comedy) treated his work as a template. For a stretch in the 1970s and 1980s the same body of work was dismissed as easy listening, until a 1990s generation reclaimed it: Noel Gallagher put him on the cover of Oasis’s debut and the White Stripes cut a hard-rock version of one of his songs.²⁴ Contemporary producers from Pharrell Williams to Jack Antonoff work in a harmonic landscape that Bacharach helped expand, his vocabulary so absorbed it stopped sounding like his.

His career is one of the strongest arguments for Pop as craft: a song in 7/8 time can be a hit single, and the audience is smarter than the industry thinks.

MAP

Explorer

Burt Bacharach

Training and the Brill Building

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

The Bacharach–David–Warwick triangle

Key records

After the triangle

Legacy and influence

See also

MAP

Explorer

Burt Bacharach

Training and the Brill Building

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

The Bacharach–David–Warwick triangle

Key records

After the triangle

Legacy and influence

See also

Footnotes