The beauty and bastardisation of Burt Bacharach: Five essential songs and their unusual covers
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(Credits: Far Out / ABC Television / Alamy / Anefo)
If you managed to write one successful pop song, you’d be pretty content with that, right? The glory and notoriety that comes with that, no matter how brief, is enough to dine out on for an eternity, and it’s a badge you can wear with honour for the rest of your life.
Imagine how it must feel to have written as many as Burt Bacharach has, reaching number one in the Billboard charts seven times, getting into the top 40 on a total of 52 occasions, and having your work covered by over 1,000 different artists. You’re not dining out on that forever; you’re going to feel overfed, sated beyond your heart’s content, and unable to move for how full you feel. It’s not just an impressive claim to be able to make, it’s a lifetime of accomplishments beyond comprehension.
Often working alongside lyricist Hal David, Bacharach’s compositions represented the pinnacle of orchestrally-driven, lavish and intelligent pop across eight decades, with songs ranging from easy listening, lounge and jazz to big band and classical pieces. Very few songwriters can claim to have been both as prolific as Bacharach and as supremely talented as he was at finding melodies that sounded different on every occasion.
Given how many artists have performed his work, it would be difficult to simply narrow down a list of the best interpretations of his work, so instead, we’ve selected five essential classic tracks of his that are faithful to the original arrangement, and five alternative versions of the same songs that test the limits of where the songs can be taken.
Five essential Burt Bacharach songs and their unusual covers:
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