Burt Bacharach

His love songs were suffused with melancholy, but that just raised the stakes of his romantic vision.

Yet Aretha, with her voice of awesome power, uses that voice to take a song of extraordinary vulnerability and transform it into a song of awesome faith. And even as the first half of the 20th century gave us the indelible love songs of artists like Gershwin and Cole Porter, the second half was nothing less than a bounty of romantic searching. In 1969, the song he wrote for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” stopped that cheeky movie in its tracks and injected it with a note of ironic heartbreak that reconfigured how a song could define a movie. The forlorn beauty of that song, melting into a sunburst of ecstasy in the chorus, said that love, even fulfilled, is a step away from longing. And it was the exquisite ache of the music that raised the stakes, that dramatized the sadness that love would rescue you from. It’s a song of absolute devotion rooted in absolute despair, sung by a woman whose love is so total that the man who won’t return it — who keeps betraying her — must not even have a heart. Growing up on his music, I grooved, in the family car, to his ’60 hits — the Warwick songs (“Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” in its jaunty way, seemed as individual and almost confessional a statement of loneliness as any song I’d heard), and the one I often think of as his greatest, “The Look of Love,” which somehow, miraculously, expresses a core of melancholy not in the longing for love but in the very fulfillment of it. Just listen to “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” the 1962 song that was “What the World Needs Now,” with its slow percussive waltz rhythm and plangent staircase of major and minor chords, ascending into shimmering sevenths in the middle section (“Lord, we don’t need another mountain…”), was a love song about love: a celebration of it that also seemed to be gently weeping over our collective yearning for it. The chords that created a veritable dialogue between major and minor — it was all so beautiful and wistful and tender, so delicate in its rapture, and so sad. And if love was the thing there was just too little of, even in Burt Bacharach’s world, which was a place of staggering romantic devotion, then consider, for just a moment, how true that must be today, in our own world of online hookups and dating-as-shopping and postmodern cynicism. “What the world needs now is love, sweet love” was an easy enough sentiment to take in, but it was the following line that etched itself on my childhood soul: “It’s the only thing…

'His songs were an inspiration to people like me.'

[Beck recently paid tribute](https://www.iheart.com/content/2023-02-10-beck-compares-phone-calls-from-burt-bacharach-with-those-from-the-president/) by comparing phone calls from him to those from "the president." A legend in his own right, the former [Beatle](https://www.iheart.com/artist/the-beatles-591/?autoplay=true) said Bacharach's "songs were an inspiration to people like me" and praised his "distinctive" work in the '60s and '70s. "His songs were an inspiration to people like me.

The Jewish composer wrote dozens of hits from the 1960s through the 2000s. Do you know the way to San Jose? If you do, you've experienced the magic that was ...

Unlike many of their peers, Bacharach and David wrote music for Black artists, including Dionne Warwick, who worked closely with them throughout the next decade. Bacharach and David began to collaborate again, producing the hit Sunny Weather Lover. They aimed for a sophisticated sound, and wrote music for adults rather than the teenage market on which many of their peers concentrated. Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in the New York neighborhood of Forest Hill, Queens. Bacharach met the lyricist Hal David there, and the two soon began collaborating on songs together. Many of the composers who worked there were Jewish, including the song-writing teams of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and Carole King and Gerry Goffin.

A line from one of his 1980s songs, long after we knew the way to San Jose, may have best summed up Burt Bacharach's place in popular music.

If nothing else, he put San Jose in the news long before most of us heard of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley. Songs like "Walk on By" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" Along with Frank Sinatra and others whose music succeeding generations are sure to discover, they are stayers in a dog-eat-dog world that asks entertainers to repeat their success over and over and in which many are consumed.

The Post's Cindy Adams recalls her longtime friendship with the late songwriter Burt Bacharach — as well as his parents Bert and Irma.

She became a nun. He became a hermit. She a queen. Like when he did his first B’way musical after “Promises, Promises.” Like when he won at Santa Anita. Visiting her in the hospital in ’84. Then he ran for president. He a Knight of the Round Table. Came a fire. He kept house on the isle of Elba but stayed nice. No piker, he built his missus the Taj Mahal. I myself reported she showed at big-time galas in return for jewelry.

'His songs were an inspiration to people like me.'

[Beck recently paid tribute](https://www.iheart.com/content/2023-02-10-beck-compares-phone-calls-from-burt-bacharach-with-those-from-the-president/) by comparing phone calls from him to those from "the president." A legend in his own right, the former [Beatle](https://www.iheart.com/artist/the-beatles-591/?autoplay=true) said Bacharach's "songs were an inspiration to people like me" and praised his "distinctive" work in the '60s and '70s. "His songs were an inspiration to people like me.

The music and entertainment worlds mourned on February 9 with the news that legendary pop music composer Burt Bacharach had passed away at the age of 94.

By the time of the third entry in the franchise, Though his time onscreen was brief, introduced by [fourth-wall breaks](https://www.cbr.com/deadpool-breaks-fourth-wall/) and on the whole somewhat strange to think about, the little moments set aside for Bacharach feel now like a tribute to his work. [Austin Powers in Goldmember](https://www.cbr.com/austin-powers-trilogy-netflix/), Bacharach's appearance was all but expected, and his encore performance of "What the World Needs Now" in the credits was cited by fans as a highlight. Powers, attempting to seduce fellow secret agent Vanessa Kensington, takes her for a night on the town in Vegas, apparently able to schedule a date with her atop a tour bus while Bacharach serenades them with one of his best-known songs, "What the World Needs Now." Part of that legacy, it was acknowledged, was a boost from his brief time onscreen with Mike Myers, a fan of Bacharach, in 1997's Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Around the turn of the century, he cameoed in all three of Mike Myers'