Burt Bacharach Was America’s Greatest Pop Songwriter: His 8 Essential Compositions

A lot of people can write one good song. But how many songwriters can create a body of work that primarily through the voices of others not only defines an era and a genre, but goes beyond its era and beyond its genre to become a classic? Probably only a handful, and Burt Bacharach was one of them.

Bacharach, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, may be the only American on a list of contemporary songwriters whose music has circled the world for so long and so prominently.

While yielding lyric-writing duties to his longtime songwriting partner Hal David or one of his many other collaborators, Bacharach displayed a mastery of setting a lyric to a melody or composing a melody for lyrical context that is unrivaled by any other musician except maybe Paul McCartney. Bacharach effectively established the modern use of what is referred to as a “hook,” and is unquestionably one of a handful of modern composers whose complete mastery of melodic composition, across genres and styles, transcended most commercial comprehension. His wide range of compositions constantly inspire the question “Burt Bacharach wrote that?”

In many ways, Burt Bacharach’s music is tied to the 1960s, but given the ubiquity of his songs today — even untethered to their composer — they’re free of the time period where many original listeners may have locked in his sound. People who remember Bacharach’s large catalog may refer to those songs as “oldies.”

Bacharach’s time-transcending body of work can only be compared to The Beatles — as a staggering long-burning burst of creativity that stands as one of the most prolific of any musical era.

Younger generations might be familiar with Bacharach himself through his curious yet essential cameo in the 1997 comedy film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. While ostensibly a parody of the glorious ridiculousness of the James Bond films of the ’60s, the film turns into a commentary of “stuck in an era” values — a concept that’s universally applicable.

In the comedy, Powers has been frozen since the ’60s along with a small batch of possessions that includes a record of Bacharach playing his own compositions. While Powers is a fish-out-of-water in the cynical, kinetic 1990s, his free-spirited love of love is undeniably a lost concept in the modern era.

During one scene when Powers is contemplating his place in the modern world, he and his partner Vanessa take a private bus ride through Las Vegas, during which Powers comically breaks the fourth wall and announces to the audience, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Burt Bacharach!” The film then immediately cuts to Bacharach (already next to the duo) playing a piano rendition of his signature composition “What The World Needs Now Is Love.” As it happens, this is the film’s (and the song’s) main point: the world still needed love, even decades after the song was composed in 1965, and it always will.

Here are  of Burt Bacharach’s most essential compositions.

1. “What The World Needs Now Is Love,” Burt Bacharach & The Posies
Hal David is said to have struggled with writing the perfect lyrics to the song for years, but once completed, they struck a chord with millions of people around the world just barely beginning to experience the turmoil of the Vietnam War. Lyrics aside, the song’s tender melody carries nearly all of its emotional weight. Whether Jackie DeShannon’s original recording; or the eerie remix in 1971 featuring incorporations of the protest song “Abraham, Martin and John,” with samples of news broadcasts and eulogies surrounding the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.; or Bacharach’s own rendition backed by The Posies for the Austin Powers soundtrack, Bacharach’s songwriting abilities were not only once-in-a-generation great, but arguably the kind of talent that seldom comes around more often than once per century.
2. “I Say a Little Prayer,” Aretha Franklin
No doubt, Bacharach’s ability to work closely with the artists interpreting his songs helped his efforts, but that fact can be swept aside when taking into account that many of his greatest chart accomplishments became successful covers. Bacharach may have written “I Say a Little Prayer” for his closest and most frequent collaborator, Dionne Warwick, but we all know the song is owned by Aretha Franklin, whose effortless singing on the release just a year after Warwick’s made her cover just as popular.
3. “The Look of Love,” Dusty Springfield
Of course, Burt Bacharach was not the first modern composer to make songs “catchy,” but he certainly emphasized a song’s emotional resonance in terms of its ability to be remembered. Dusty Springfield’s ultra-seductive stroll through “The Look of Love” finds its stride on the chorus, a step up from Springfield’s seemingly unquenchable desire on the verses. And Bacharach places sharp melodic emphasis on Davis’ lyric “I can hardly wait to hold you, feel my arms around you.” 4. “God Give Me Strength”/”I Still Have That Other Girl,” Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach
Bacharach’s first of many collaborations with Elvis Costello, “God Give Me Strength” was a tonic for the abrasive post-Nirvana musical landscape, more akin to Bacharach’s earliest work in the pre-Beatles ’60s. 5. “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” The White Stripes
Cameron Diaz may have given us the funniest version of this song with that cringe karaoke scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding, but Jack White’s whisper-to-scream rendition of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” takes the song’s surface-level frustration and gives it the appropriate amount of performative frustration that was called for in Bacharach’s original composition. 6. “Always Something There to Remind Me,” Naked Eyes
“Always Something There to Remind Me” gains a lot from changing very little of the arrangement between Lou Johnson’s original rendition and Naked Eyes’ bombastic synth-pop rendition two decades later. Different eras, same emotions.
7. “Walk on By,” Isaac Hayes
Originally recorded by Dionne Warwick, “Walk on By” is transformed into an emotional tornado in the hands of Isaac Hayes, who stretched the song into an 11-minute symphonic soul jam. 8. “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” B.J. Thomas
B.J. Thomas’ massive hit “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” embodies the whimsical and optimistic nature of 1970s top-40 pop.