Anyone Who Had a Heart - RIP Hal David

Knowing I love you so 
Anyone who had a heart 
Would take me in his arms 
And love me too

Every generation should have its celebrated songwriting teams - artists who churn out hit after hit that become part of the soundtrack of our lives. There's something comforting about knowing they're out there, working to reflect back to us our daily joys and sorrows, keeping us wondering what they're going to do next.

The Baby Boomer generation was lucky to have two prolific teams who put their distinctive stamp on our times - John Lennon and Paul McCartney, of course, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Bacharach and David were the classic style of team - one wrote the lyrics, the other composed the song. As lyricist, Hal David, who died yesterday at 91, had a knack for putting words together that captured the feelings we all had.

They wrote so many songs it would be impossible to pick my favorite. Their songs were everywhere when I was growing up, and I associate different ones with different things. But where lyrics alone are concerned, I did zero in on one when I heard the news of David's death, and that is Anyone Who Had a Heart from 1963. It makes me cry every time I hear it, like right now, and why? Because it just nails heartbreak. It's the simplest composition, but the words he selected were the perfect ones. There were no better ones.

Bacharach-David songs never seemed formulaic, and looking on Hal David's website, I believe I've found at least half of the reason for that. Here are his own words about how he wrote lyrics:

In writing I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact. Believability is the easiest of the three to accomplish. One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity. I often discard a good line because it is inconsistent with the basic idea. If the line happens to be witty or sad in a particularly fresh way it hurts me to take it out. But that's part of the pain of writing. 

Simplicity is much harder to achieve. It is easy to be simple and bad. Being simple and good is very difficult. The sophisticated Cole Porter, the earthy Irving Berlin, the poetic Oscar Hammerstein, and the witty Lorenz Hart all have one thing in common - simplicity, the kind that is good. I must also mention a special favorite of mine, Johnny Mercer. Whether he is being poetic or humorous, he is never complicated. I seek this elusive thing called simplicity always. I hope I sometimes achieve it. 

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond. Unless I can create an emotion to which I can respond, I throw the lyric away. Although I cannot know how others will react, I assume that if it moves me it may do the same for them. Sometimes I am right, sometimes I am wrong. 

Anyone Who Had A Heart had many things going for it - a brilliant composer in Bacharach and the sublime voice of Dionne Warwick, for starters. But David hit the trifecta here with his lyrics - they had believability, simplicity and emotional impact in spades. 

I won't recount his life here - there's a good obituary on him in today's New York Times, with many facts about him that I did not know. RIP Hal David.

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, B.J. Thomas (1966)

And while we're on the subject of B.J. Thomas ... I'll write about one of his songs that brings me to tears at the first note, his gorgeous cover of Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.
"Never listen to this sad song after cocktail hour," says one YouTube commenter. Probably good advice, unless you feel like having your heart ripped out.

Growing up, country music was a musical genre that was largely relegated to a subculture many associated with Hee Haw and cariacaturish women with gigantic wigs. Consequently, my primary exposure to its worthy songs came through more contemporary artists like B.J. Thomas who took Williams' version and made it his own.

A more pleasing singing voice you couldn't hope to find. Thomas began honing that voice in church as a child in Houston, and the rich, gospel-esque tones that I've always responded to must have been nourished in that environment. He was lead singer for a group called the Triumphs when I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry was first recorded, which led to his being signed by a national label. With national distribution, it became a Top 10 hit.

Thomas achieved more enduring stardom when as a solo artist he released Hooked on a Feeling and Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head. The story goes that Thomas was handed the opportunity to record the soundtrack version of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid song thanks to Dionne Warwick, who was a fellow artist on Thomas' record label and brought him to Burt Bacharach's attention as he was casting about for the right singer. (Bob Dylan and Ray Stevens were among those who turned down the opportunity, apparently.)

I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself, Dionne Warwick (1966)

It is probably only in hindsight that I've come to realize how artists like Dionne Warwick were pivotal in fostering my lifelong appreciation of virtuoso singers.

An ubiquitous presence over the airwaves throughout the 60s, I'm not sure I completely appreciated her gifts then. She was just always there, with one hit after the other - 20 during that decade alone - served up via what she has described as the "three-sided marriage that worked" - her lengthy collaboration with composer Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David.

Before she was discovered by Bacharach, Warwick had her own gospel group, the Gospelaires, with sister Dee Dee and aunt Cissy Houston, and sang backup on records for the Drifters, Bobby Darin, Dinah Washington, Brook Benton, the Shirelles, Ruth Brown and Chuck Jackson. It was at a Drifters recording session for the song Mexican Divorce that the two met.

Originally hired to cut demos, it was soon clear that Warwick was destined to be a star in her own right, and had her first hit with Don't Make Me Over. Her songs were a thing apart from rock and roll or R&B, and being hard to classify were sometimes relegated to that category of popular music that was seen somehow as less cool. Yet when I listen to these songs today, I find many of them quite breathtaking, and they unfailingly evoke my teenage years.

Dionne was easily the most serene and elegant female performer of that era, with a wide vocal register that defied description and made for deceptively easy listening. Check it out ... Although an earlier version of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself was a hit for Dusty Springfield, I find that arrangement much more overwrought than seems strictly necessary. Dionne's version captured what it feels like to confront the emptiness of lost love to perfection.

In a 2003 story on Warwick in the Independent, Elvis Costello described the Tao of Dionne thusly: "The things that make Burt and Hal's songs extraordinary also create all kinds of difficulties for a performer. In Dionne Warwick, Bacharach and David found this incredibly talented singer who was able to negotiate things that were metrically and harmonically terribly complex, and make them sound conversational and effortless. She has great control and range: she has that dry, close voice but she can also get really big and dramatic without ever sounding strained. Bacharach used to say: `Don't count it - feel it.' And Dionne feels it. That's her great gift."