His love songs were suffused with melancholy, but that just raised the stakes of his romantic vision.
The way that some people remember seeing the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan,” I remember the first time I heard a Burt Bacharach song. I was eight years old and I watched Jackie DeShannon perform “What the World Needs Now Is Love” on our black-and-white TV set. I had never been spellbound like that. Right off, something in the lyrics got to me. “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… that there’s just too little of.” In the ’60s, it often seemed like everyone in the world was talking about love. The Beatles were avatars of love; they would soon come to tell us that all you needed was love. Yet here was a song, all about love — a dizzy, swooning homage to it — whose central declaration is that there still wasn’t enough of it.
That haunted me. It told me something: that love was the sister of loss. “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. 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 it may need even more than it did then.
The lyrics, of course, were written by Hal David. Yet it was Bacharach’s music that caressed them into a sublime statement. The winding melody (to quote Lydia Tár on Bach) seemed to be asking a question. 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. So happy and sad at the same time. “What the World Needs Now” seemed to be saying: Love can save us, but who will save love?
The music of Burt Bacharach was like that. It beckoned, it soared, it lifted you up, yet it was rooted in a place of exquisite and gorgeous melancholy. Just listen to “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” the 1962 song that was Dionne Warwick’s first Top 10 hit. 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.
