Outside of maybe Frank Sinatra's work with Sammy Cahn and Jimmy van Heusen, it's hard to think of a more perfect marriage of singer and songwriting team than the partnership of Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, and Hal David. This Tuesday, Collector's Choice will release nine of the first ten albums Dionne Warwick cut for Scepter Records between 1963 and 1968, which represent their rise to stardom.
By 1964, Dionne Warwick had become a presence on the pop charts through her hits "Don't Make Me Over" and "Anyone Who Had A Heart." But her third album, Make Way For Dionne Warwick, was the first to chart, largely on the strength of "Walk On By," her second Top Ten pop hit and one of the most enduring songs of the era, and "You'll Never Get To Heaven."
As with her previous work, these songs expanded upon the Brill Building hits Pomus-Shuman and Leiber-Stoller had written for The Drifters a few years back, mixing pop melodies, R&B vocals with Latin rhythms and lush string arrangements. Bacharach's melodies featured outrageous intervals and drifted in and out of complex time signatures, and David's lyrics dealt with more adult issues in relationships than anything else around. Warwick's astonishing and versatile voice allowed them to be heard all over the AM radio dial, soulful enough for black radio, young enough for the white masses, and musical enough for jazz and Broadway fans.
Some of the songs on Make Way For is also notable for the number of songs that would later become hits for other artists, including "Wishin' And Hopin'" (almost identical to Dusty Springfield's version) and "Close To You" (not nearly as cloying as The Carpenters' recording). The album also opens with another Bacharach-David standard, "A House Is Not A Home," which is better-suited for a man (check out Brook Benton's or Luther Vandross' versions), although Warwick pulls it off with aplomb.
Back then, albums were seen as little more than the singles plus a whole lot of filler. That's largely true in this case (two songs had been previously released on Warwick's first album), but Bacharach and David used the extra tracks to experiment with more challenging material to see what she could do, and the artistic success of "Land Of Make Believe" and "The Last One To Be Loved" hint at the greatness to be found on 1965's Here I Am.
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