Word: bacharachs
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...Burt Bacharach's music has always had its thoughtful admirers along with its merely numerous ones. But given 30 years' worth of toxically vaporous renditions of his tunes seeping out of elevators, of knotty little songs like I'll Never Fall in Love Again and deliciously bitter ones like Walk On By being consigned to the easy-listening bins--the pop equivalent of assisted suicide--it takes a lot of nerve for a serious jazz musician like McCoy Tyner to record What the World Needs Now (Impulse!), an entire album of Bacharach compositions. And it takes even more nerve...
OKLAHOMA CITY: As fan mail goes, it doesn't get much better than having the FBI request it as evidence. Oklahoma Gazette reporter Phil Bacharach handed over to federal authorities a handwritten letter written by Timothy McVeigh last November in which the Oklahoma City bombing suspect detailed his beef against the Justice Department. The Gazette, a local arts weekly, made the letter public Tuesday. In the note, dated November 26, 1996, McVeigh commends an article Bacharach had written about him and provided this clarification: "You quote me as saying that the FBI are ?wizards at PR.? What I actually said...
...nostalgic history and satisfying dramas. But the music is first-class evocation. The essential artifact for both works is not the movie but the album. Coincidentally, each film's sound track was developed the same way: a dozen or so pop composers--some veterans of the '60s like Bacharach, Lesley Gore (It's My Party) and King's ex-husband Gerry Goffin, others so young they weren't alive when the Brill Building was the Pentagon of pop--wrote tunes with the bounce and pang of the old stuff. As Gore, who helped write one number in Grace...
Except for a Dixie Cup-esque cut (I Do), the Grace of My Heart songs aren't primarily parodies; they're just good music. The pearl is God Give Me Strength, by Bacharach and Elvis Costello. Broody and complex, it suggests a tune Bacharach might have given Dionne Warwick to sing in an uptown nightclub at 3 a.m. "Burt consciously breaks rules with bar lines," says Costello. "He's breaking the meter, but it still feels natural. And he expresses feeling so much better than the trumped-up romantic ballads of today, where the emotions seem to have come...
Instead of sitting in the Brill Building, the writers worked via fax and voice mail. Yet, Bacharach says, the aim is the same: "Despite the machinery, the finesse of modern record making, underneath it all, there has to be a yearning for a melody. You still need something to whistle...