Boomers for Bacharach

Nostalgia is the first reason for me and my fellow Boomers to like the music of Burt Bacharach, who died this month at 94.

With lyricist Hal David, Bacharach wrote songs that we learned from our parents' radios and 8-track tape decks, including Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, Close to You, What Do You Get When You Fall in Love? and my dad's favorite, What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love). Like lava lamps and floral prints on plastic cushions, those songs are part of a Boomer's mental furniture. Like those fashions, Bacharach's blend of soft rock percussion with brass and strings gave our parents a way to stay "with it," to be "cool." It didn't work, but, B+ for effort. When I hear any of his songs, I think fondly of Mom and Dad in their prime.

Then, in my teens and early adulthood, Bacharach's advanced musical vocabulary was what I liked. I displayed my musical knowledge by commenting on Bacharach's complex harmony, mixed meters, and odd song structures. When I played Bacharach's song Promises, Promises on the piano, I pounded its dissonant chords in shifting time signatures of 3/4, 4/4, 3/8, and 4/8 to show off my musical machismo -- which, I admit, was the only machismo I had.

But I learned how to appreciate Bacharach's expressiveness over impressiveness. Bacharach told interviewer Terri Gross that he set phrases the way they made sense to him; he never realized he was changing meters in a song until he notated it. So the character in the Broadway show Promises, Promises spits out the title phrase in 6/8, disgusted by the sleazy promises he's made; when he imagines life free of moral compromises, the meter shifts for expansive declarations: I can live with myself and be proud - I laugh out loud!.

In another song for that show, Hal David wrote, Go while the going is good. / Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing that anyone can learn. / Go! On the second phrase, Bacharach spikes the melody up an octave on the -ing of knowing and sets all the following syllables on fast notes, all one pitch, like the hammering of an alarm bell: ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! Then that single syllable Go! swells like a siren for a full measure. The music conveys the urgency that the lyrics express.

The song "This Guy's in Love with You," without hook or bridge, consists of just two verses and a tag line, a structure both unusual and very effective. Read the opening phrases aloud and you've got the basic rhythm for the whole song, a slow shuffle: You see this guy? This guy's in love with you. We hear the tune played on a muted trumpet before we hear the words, with just a piano for accompaniment. The singer asks the person he loves, Who looks at you the way I do? By the end of the second verse, evidently not getting a straight answer, "this guy" is breaking down: My hands are shaking; don't let my heart be breaking.

Up to this point, Bacharach has kept a full orchestra in reserve. The strings and winds come in forte when the singer opens up, I need your love, I want your love. Same pitches as the opening phrase, same rhythm, but so different now. Bacharach expands the phrase in two more lines: Say you're in love / in love with this guy. At peak volume, the orchestra plays chords in triplet and stops. After a pause, the singer finishes softly, If not, I'll just die. The trumpet and piano repeat the intro, the musical equivalent of shuffling sadly away.

I don't remember caring about that song before Vic Bolton, a tenor in our high school chorus, sang it for our concert. I wanted to cry.

Bacharach once said his own favorite was his title song for the 1966 movie Alfie, because he liked the message. You don't have to see the movie to gather from Hal David's lyric that Alfie is a cynic who believes it's just for the moment, we [should] take more than we give, and life is for the strong. The song is an intervention, as the singer challenges Alfie's worldview and then offers an alternative. The song tickles my nostalgia for the 1960s when philosophers, poets, and theologians were part of our popular culture, along with their discussions of existentialism, "Is God Dead?" and the absurdity of life. I like the message too.

But I also like the way Bacharach's music expresses that message. Bacharach sets the syllables of the name "Alfie" on a rising fifth, like a fanfare (e.g. the Star Wars theme), perfect for the name of a cocky character. But Bacharach undercuts that confident sound with dissonant intervals (m6, M7, m2) in lines intended to discomfort Alfie, such as, if only fools are kind, Alfie / then I guess it is wise to be cruel. Two verses follow that pattern before Hal David's words shift towards the singer's creed, one that even unbelievers can believe in. The vocal lines for that part climb up and down wide intervals over shifting chords. When the singer settles back into the notes of the opening line, it's a sunny declaration emerging from clouds:

I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love, we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed, you're nothing, Alfie..

A recording of Alfie by Cleo Laine made this my favorite of all Bacharach's songs. It's on her 1983 album That Old Feeling. She's a virtuoso musician and an actress, and she brings out every nuance in the words as she navigates the twists and jumps in Bacharach's music. The song was recorded in her living room with simple piano accompaniment, making her quiet rendition almost uncomfortably intimate. (See my reflections on Cleo.)

About Bacharach's later work, I'm agnostic. I liked his theme from the 1981 movie Arthur, and I enjoy an album of Bacharach songs played by jazz pianist McCoy Tyner with trio and full orchestra. I bought that because I'd heard Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach talk on the radio about new songs they had written together. I've downloaded those, but they're hard for me to appreciate because -- well, I prefer Costello's talking.

[I first admired Stephen Sondheim for the difficulty of his music. Read about how his music is hard to sing, and why that's a good thing, in my blogpost from 06/2015.]