Feb 14th 2023

Self-Portrait of an Experimental Songwrite

by David W. Galenson

Dr. David W. Galenson is Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago; Academic Director of the Center for Creativity Economics at Universidad del CEMA, Buenos Aires; and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His publications include Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge University Press and NBER, 2009). David W. Galenson, picture aboce. Derek Walcott, picture in the text.

 

Originally posted on the Huffington Post in 2014.

When Bob Dylan and the Beatles were creating a conceptual revolution in popular music, producing works that were highly personal, obscure, and often incomprehensible to listeners, Bacharach was the greatest composer who continued the experimental tradition of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the other giants of the Golden Age.

As a high school student, Burt Bacharach always had trouble getting to school on time: he couldn't sleep at night because he kept hearing music in his head. Throughout his life, Bacharach would never stop hearing music, because for him music would always be about sounds rather than ideas.

Bacharach was born in 1928, but he was not a precocious young genius, and he didn't write his first hit -- "The Story of My Life," recorded by Marty Robbins -- until he was 29 years old. He met Hal David when he was 27, and Dionne Warwick seven years later. These became the two most important relationships of his professional life. During the 1960s, the composer-lyricist team of Bacharach and David would produce more than a hundred songs, and Warwick would make dozens of these into hits.

Bacharach's work of the '60s stands among the greatest decades ever enjoyed by a songwriter. The hits sung by Warwick included "Make It Easy on Yourself," "Anyone Who Had a Heart," "Wishin' and Hopin'," "Walk on By," "You'll Never Get to Heaven," "I Say a Little Prayer," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," and "Promises, Promises;" those first recorded by others included "Any Day Now," "Only Love Can Break a Heart," "Close to You," "Always Something There to Remind Me," "A House is Not a Home," "What the World Needs Now," "What's New Pussycat," "Alfie," "The Look of Love," "One Less Bell to Answer," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," and "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." All of these songs are immediately familiar to anyone who loved popular music during the '60s. Just when Bob Dylan and the Beatles were creating a conceptual revolution in popular music, producing works that were highly personal, obscure, and often incomprehensible to listeners, Bacharach was the greatest composer who continued the experimental tradition of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the other giants of the Golden Age, writing sophisticated but direct and simple love songs that would have universal meaning and appeal.

Bacharach's recent memoir, Anyone Who Had a Heart, provides a fascinating and detailed self-portrait of a great experimental innovator at work. Bacharach is a classic example of the experimental syndrome in which the perfect is the enemy of the good, and even of the excellent. Early in his career, he discovered he needed to produce the songs he wrote: "by actually being in the studio while the record was being cut, I could protect my material and make the song sound the way I had heard it in my head and then played it. I could start with a framework and then evolve from that as the musicians heard the song and then played it."

He was tough on musicians and singers, but tougher on himself:

"In the studio, I would do as many as 20 or 30 takes, listen compulsively to all the playbacks and mixes as many times as I could, and then play the acetate over and over again. Before a record was ever released, I would have heard it about a thousand times and I was still never satisfied with the way it sounded on the radio."

After a recording date, he would wake up in the middle of the night and agonize: "No matter how hard I tried, nothing was ever perfect."

Bacharach was classically trained, and often wrote songs that were difficult to play and sing perfectly, but this was never his intention: "the last thing on my mind was to ever make a song that would be difficult for musicians to play or for an audience to understand." Like the great Golden Age songwriters, Bacharach and David wrote not for themselves, but for their performers: "Hal and I were always trying to come up with material for Dionne to record. Like tailors in the apparel business, we were making goods for her to sing." When Bacharach began to score movies, he worked to craft his songs for situations: "the only way I could really learn how to time the music cues was by watching the film over and over until I knew it by heart."

In typically experimental fashion, Bacharach wrote slowly and painstakingly, and revised endlessly: "I have never had a song come to me fully formed, in a blinding flash of inspiration. What I do is tinker. I fiddle. If a melody comes too easily to me, I don't think it's any good, so I turn it upside down and look at it in the middle of the night...I play with the melody, explore it, question it, and see if I can keep making it better." And in spite of his enormous success, Bacharach has always had the uncertainty of an experimental artist: "I still always had the feeling that maybe I was putting the world on and I wasn't really all that good or original." It wasn't until Miles Davis told him he thought "Alfie" was a really good song that "he dispelled a lot of that doubt for me and gave me the kind of credibility I had never been able to give myself."

In 2012, Burt Bacharach and Hal David were awarded the 2012 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, which had previously been won only by Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney. Decades earlier, however, he had received perhaps an even greater honor from Ira Gershwin, who gave him the sheet music from a song he had written with his late brother, inscribed to Bacharach "with admiration." The tribute was fitting, for there is little doubt that Gershwin's brother George, and his friends Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter, would have appreciated Burt Bacharach's music, and admired the professionalism and craftsmanship of their fellow experimental songwriter.

 

Browse articles by author

More Essays

May 4th 2023
EXTRACT: "My recent book on them 25 Unforgettable French Faces covers a wide range of individuals, from an aging Brigitte Bardot to architect Gustave Eiffel. Both of them changed the face of France. In the upcoming sequel, 25 More Unforgettable French Faces, I have completed my collection of 50 examples. The new book, now in progress, ranges from The Bad Boy of the 18th Century (Voltaire) to A Man of Principle (Jean-Paul Sartre) and Big Dark Eyes, (the actress Audrey Tautou)."
May 4th 2023
EXTRACT: "Silicon solar cells are an established technology for the generation of electricity from the sun. But they take a lot of energy to produce, are rigid and can be fragile. However, a new class of solar cell is matching their performance. And what’s more, it can now be printed out using special inks and wrapped flexibly around uneven surfaces."
Apr 21st 2023
EXTRACT: "You learn from your mistakes. At least, most of us have been told so. But science shows that we often fail to learn from past errors. Instead, we are likely to keep repeating the same mistakes." .... "Sometimes we stick with certain behaviour patterns, and repeat our mistakes because of an “ego effect” that compels us to stick with our existing beliefs. We are likely to selectively choose the information structures and feedback that help us protect our egos." ..... "....there are simpler things we can do. One is to become more comfortable with making mistakes. We might think that this is the wrong attitude towards failures, but it is in fact a more positive way forward."
Mar 17th 2023
EXTRACTS: "The intensifying concentration of wealth, and unjustifiable level of income inequality is proving disastrous in many ways. Here are just a few of them. First, less equal societies typically have more unstable economies, and this country is no exception." --- "Second, there is an incontrovertible link between economic inequality and violent crime. The fact is that rates of violence are higher in more unequal societies." --- "Third, the undeniable fact is that the greater the economic inequality that exists, the worse it is for general health outcomes. What is sometimes overlooked is that income inequality is bad for health outcomes across economic strata, not just for those in poverty. To be sure, poor health and poverty are closely linked; but the epidemiological research shows that high levels of economic inequality “negatively affect the health of even the affluent, mainly because… inequality reduces social cohesion, a dynamic that leads to more stress, fear, and insecurity for everyone.” People live longer in countries with lower levels of inequality, as the World Bank reports. In the United States, for example, “average life expectancy is four years shorter than in some of the most equitable countries.” "
Mar 10th 2023
EDITOR: "Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor. Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing. When the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for research shedding light on quantum mechanics, it sparked excitement and discussion. But debates about quantum mechanics – be they on chat forums, in the media or in science fiction – can often get muddled thanks to a number of persistent myths and misconceptions. Here are four."
Mar 7th 2023
EXTRACT: "....the destructive logic of the false dualism of man and nature continues to threaten our civilization. The new Enlightenment would overcome this dualistic perspective, by bringing about a deep reconsideration of our moral duties to animals and future generations, and transforming how we inhabit the Earth. Instead of thinking of ourselves as separate from nature, we must recognize that we are embedded in it, and that even our most mundane actions have far-reaching consequences."
Feb 28th 2023
EXTRACT: " It has now been a year since Russia, my birthplace, invaded Ukraine. For 365 days, we have been waking up to news of Russian missile strikes, bombings, murders, torture, and rape. It has been 365 days of shame and confusion, of wanting to turn away but needing to know what is happening, of watching Russians become “ruscists,” “Orks,” or “putinoids.” For 365 days, the designation “Russian-American,” previously straightforward, has felt like a contradiction in terms. For those in my situation, some methods of adapting to the new circumstances have come easier than others. Russian books still crowd my bookcase, but I no longer have any wish to re-read them. Chekhov and Nabokov cannot be blamed for the aggression against Ukraine, but it nonetheless has stolen their magic and their capacity to teach. These authors were my friends, as were the old-country rituals like Russian Easter vigils and New Year’s screenings of the Soviet classic Irony of Fate. I feel the loss acutely, but perhaps it is for the better. It helps me concentrate on the present."
Feb 18th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Like the United States, France has gained strength through immigration, a fact often overlooked by opponents of open borders. Science, industry and the arts have clearly benefitted. And I found the local color in the population to be a rich source for artwork."
Feb 17th 2023
EXTRACT: "Insects are by far the most numerous of all animals on Earth. The estimated global total of new insect material that grows each year is an astonishing 1,500 million tonnes. Most of this is immediately consumed by an upward food chain of predators and parasites, so that the towering superstructure of all the Earth’s animal diversity is built on a foundation of insects and their arthropod relatives. ---- If insects decline, then other wild animals must inevitably decline too."
Feb 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "When Bob Dylan and the Beatles were creating a conceptual revolution in popular music, producing works that were highly personal, obscure, and often incomprehensible to listeners, Bacharach was the greatest composer who continued the experimental tradition of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the other giants of the Golden Age."
Feb 7th 2023
EXTRACT: "Many of Hopper’s most famous works – Nighthawks (1942), for example (not in the exhibition) – have become so ubiquitous that we are in danger of no longer being able to see them. The corrective for this over-exposure is to engage with the artist’s less familiar work; that is, to come to the artist through another portal – obliquely, if you will – and thereby trace a new path into the world that his oeuvre represents. Hopper observed, “I think I’m not very human, I didn’t want to paint people posturing and grimacing. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” It is as telling a description as any of Hopper’s painterly fascination with New York City."
Feb 3rd 2023
EXTRACT: "The built environment we inhabit is just the residue of a much greater imaginative world that never saw the light of day, evoking what might have been or still could be..."
Jan 18th 2023
EXTRACT: "In 2018, former US president Bill Clinton coauthored a novel with James Patterson, the world’s bestselling author. The President is Missing is a typical “Patterson”: a page-turner of a thriller, easy to read, with short chapters and large font. Patterson is accustomed to collaborative writing ..... He is as much a producer as he is a writer, using a string of junior collaborators to run his factory of novels. Patterson outlines the plot, the coauthors write the story, Patterson offers feedback. While he doesn’t seem to do much writing himself, it is a system that has made Patterson a rich man."
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "With hindsight, 2022 will be seen as the year when artificial intelligence gained street credibility. The release of ChatGPT by the San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI garnered great attention and raised even greater questions.  In just its first week, ChatGPT attracted more than a million users and was used to write computer programs, compose music, play games, and take the bar exam. Students discovered that it could write serviceable essays worthy of a B grade – as did teachers, albeit more slowly and to their considerable dismay."
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: "The thought of her, as always, gave me a jolt of hope, and a burst of energy. And a stab of sorrow."
Jan 14th 2023
EXTRACT: ".....if academic discourse and campus debate are shut down every time a person feels offended, how can universities possibly examine controversial topics? Without intellectual freedom – one of the great achievements of American civilization – they can’t."
Jan 5th 2023
EXTRACTS: "London's Tate Britain and Paris' Petit Palais have collaborated to produce a wonderful retrospective exhibition of the art of Walter Sickert (1860-1942).  The show is both beautiful and fascinating. ----- Virginia Woolf loved Sickert's art, and it is not difficult to see why, because his painting, like her writing, was always about intimate views of incidents, or casual portraits in which individual sitters momentarily revealed their personalities.  ------ Sickert's art never gained the status of that of Whistler or Degas, perhaps because it was too derivative of those masters.  But he was an important link between those great experimental painters and the art of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, ...."
Dec 5th 2022
EXTRACT: "One of the great paradoxes of human endeavour is why so much time and effort is spent on creating things and indulging in behaviour with no obvious survival value – behaviour otherwise known as art. Attempting to shed light on this issue is problematic because first we must define precisely what art is. We can start by looking at how art, or the arts, were practised by early humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, and immediately thereafter."
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACTS: "As a portrait artist, I am an amateur at this compared to the technology gurus and psychologists who study facial recognition seriously. Their aplications range from law enforcement to immigration control to ethnic groupings to the search through a crowd to find someone we know. ---- In my amateur artistic way, I prefer to count on intuition to find facial clues to a subject’s personality before sitting down at the drawing board. I never use the latest software to grapple with this dizzying variety.
Dec 1st 2022
EXTRACT: "In the exhibition catalog Lisane Basquiat writes: 'What is important for everyone to understand… is that he was a son, and a brother, and a grandson, and a nephew, and a cousin, and a friend. He was all of that in addition to being a groundbreaking artist.' "