Bacharach

I’m Just A Lucky So And So – that’s a lyric Mack David wrote in 1945 for Duke Ellington, the same Mack David who co-wrote Baby It’s You with Burt Bacharach, a song I first heard performed by the Beatles.Yet despite these links back to its very beginnings, Burt Bacharach isn’t part of the dull orthodoxy of rock music. When a dogmatic journalist faulted his absence from the rock’n’roll revolution in the 1950s, Bacharach responded, “I was studying with the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud and listening to Dizzy…

With the arrival of rock’n’roll, pop music divided, broadly speaking, into two categories. There was music aimed squarely at the recently discovered teenager that frequently seemed to have the specific intention of alienating their forebears. And then there was the music that carried on much as it had in the years between the end of the second world war and the appearance of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Little Richard et al. Look at the charts from 1952 or 1953, and they’re packed with songs that seem to target an older…

Burt Bacharach, an influential figure in American popular music for fifty years as a songwriter, composer, producer, and arranger, passed away on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 94. He died due to natural causes, according to Variety, a US-based media house. Variety repored that on Thursday, Tina Brausam, a spokesman for Bacharach, made the announcement. The unsurpassed melodist Bacharach achieved renown as a composer across all platforms. His compositions, many of which he co-wrote with lyricist Hal David, rose to…

Make It Easy on YourselfBurt Bacharach’s first hit had come in 1957, with the hokey country ballad The Story of My Life, his first collaboration with lyricist Hal David. The first of the songs that would define him came in 1962, with Tommy Hunt recording I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself, then Jerry Butler tackling Make It Easy on Yourself. The definitive version of that song was recorded by the Walker Brothers in 1965, a huge, overwrought edifice – strings, timpani, and Scott Walker piling on the melodrama – that…

On their 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, Arctic Monkeys took a dramatic turn for the cosmic. The band’s sixth album, Tranquility Base saw singer and songwriter Alex Turner, drummer Matt Helders, bass player Nick O’Malley and guitarist Jamie Cook ditch the muscular arena-rock sound of 2013’s AM in favour of sleazy, absurdist lounge pop. On each song, Turner sang from the perspective of some kind of rakish, wine-drunk loser, becoming a lounge lizard singing at the album’s titular casino and a property…