Burt Bacharach wrote monster hits back when I was a kid. They were always and everywhere on the radio, performed by megastars of the day – Tom Jones, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Herb Alpert, Sergio Mendes, the Carpenters, the 5th Dimension, and especially Dionne Warwick. Like most of my contemporaries, I went through a phase when I considered them overproduced and corny and just stopped listening. So, like most of the rest of pop music, Bacharach’s stuff fell off my radar and time marched on.
Then, years later like a bolt out of the blue, I heard about this album, a Bacharach-Elvis Costello collaboration released in 1998. And it blew my head off. The songs were raw, emotional, brilliant, beautiful, complex, poetic, and grown up. I found myself playing it again and again, over and over. I bought it on CD but if I’d bought it on vinyl those grooves would have been worn down to nothing.
Hearing that album drove me back to the hits I remembered from my youth and, guess what? Yeah, you get it. Try it yourself.
May Burt Bacharach rest in peace and may his memory be eternal.
Speaking Plainly 