All top easy listening songs 60s9/17/2023 ![]() ![]() The truth was that no obvious label or category could contain what Bacharach did: his style was once memorably summed up by Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen as Ravel-like harmonies wedded to street soul. ![]() Let’s dance … Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach recording in 1964. No matter how mellifluous the melody, he dealt in changing meters, odd harmonic shifts, umpteen idiosyncrasies that were perhaps the result of Bacharach’s eclectic musical education, which variously took in studying classical music under the French composer Darius Milhaud, listening to bebop musicians in the jazz clubs of New York’s 52nd Street and hanging out with avant-gardist John Cage. But in reality, the easy listening label was lazy to the point of being nonsensical, not least because – as any musician will tell you – Bacharach’s songs were seldom easy. Usually compilations of songs other performers had already made successful, they seldom showed off his compositions to their best effect. You could see why – his own albums, such as 1965’s Hit Maker! or 1967’s Reach Out, tended towards syrupy arrangements and cooing vocal choruses. He often got lumbered with the term easy listening. Look at the charts from 1966 or 1967 and you’ll find a stark split: Strawberry Fields Forever and Purple Haze v Engelbert Humperdinck and Ken Dodd’s Tears.ĭionne Warwick sued both Bacharach and Hal David for damaging her career by splitting upīut Burt Bacharach’s music existed somewhere in the middle. The twain very seldom met: if anything, the divide became more pronounced as the 1960s wore on and a cocktail of new technology and new drugs meant the music aimed at teenagers became more adventurous, strange and innovative. Look at the charts from 1952 or 1953, and they’re packed with songs that seem to target an older demographic, who didn’t want shock or rebellion or white-hot excitement, but something to soothe or buoy them along, what eventually became known as easy listening. And then there was the music that carried on much as it had in the years between the end of the second world war and the appearance of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Little Richard et al. There was music aimed squarely at the recently discovered teenager that frequently seemed to have the specific intention of alienating their forebears. With the arrival of rock’n’roll, pop music divided, broadly speaking, into two categories. ![]()
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