What the World Needs Now Is . . .

 . . . someone like Burt Bacharach.

I don't think I can say anything about Burt Bacharach, who died last week at the age of 94, that hasn't been already said.  His work speaks for itself - nearly a dozen hit songs from movies, his intricate time signatures, his dark, moody melodies, his long and successful collaboration with lyricist Hal David and singer Dionne Warwick (many of her Bacharach-David hits were also hits for Cilla Black in Britain and for Aretha Franklin in the U.S.), and numerous post-David collaborations with everyone from Carole Bayer Sager (to whom he was married for nine years) to Christopher Cross to Elvis Costello.    

Oh, and a Broadway musical, Promises Promises, based on Billy Wilder's 1960 movie The Apartment.

Bacharach was such a masterful composer, spanning decades and musical genres and particularly helping to define the sixties with Hal David - together, the greatest songwriting duo of the 1960s whose names aren't John Lennon and Paul McCartney - with their mod parlor sound (and sixties recordings of their songs always seem to have a trumpet solo).  Bacharach continued working well into his nineties and wrote enough music into the 2020s to cast a long shadow over popular music . . . the current emptiness and vacuity of which scream for another composer like Bacharach today.   

Below is my favorite recording of a Bacharach-David song, and it's not from Dionne Warwick.  Rather, it's from Herb Alpert, a recording of "This Guy's In Love With You" that topped the Billboard singles chart in America for four weeks in June and July of 1968 - Bacharach and David's first chart-topping single in their home country.

RIP.