Legendary Pop Composer, Songwriter Burt Bacharach Dies at 94

As a kid growing up in New York, he blew a rendering of “Claire de Lune” at his piano recital. His mother, a songwriter and painter, was so frustrated with his progress that she finally offered to let him quit his lessons. But then she guilted him into practicing: That new Steinway had really set the family back.

“I’m grateful for my mother being insistent and pushing,” he told the Charleston Free Times in 2019. “I wouldn’t be sitting here today if she weren’t.”

Bacharach, who died Wednesday of natural causes at 94 at his home in Los Angeles, turned that inauspicious beginning into a legendary career, writing some of pop music’s most enduring hits, including “What the World Needs Now Is Love” (1965), “This Guy’s in Love with You” (1968), “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (1969), “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (1963), and “That’s What Friends Are For” (1982).

Irrepressibly romantic, Bacharach’s music fused jazzy harmonies and syncopation with symphonic melody structure, which he polished into glossy, sophisticated, and often elegant pop — the antithesis of the hard rock and singer-songwriter movements of the late ’60s. Sometimes dismissed as easy-listening, his work, much of it in tandem with lyricist Hal David, nonetheless earned him 8 Grammy Awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award and a Trustees Award, three Academy Awards and a place at the upper strata of successful songwriters. The two also enjoyed a Broadway hit, Promises, Promises, an early pop musical, in 1968.

Bacharach performs on his piano circa 1968 in Los Angeles, California.

Martin Mills/Getty Images

While thousands of artists — from B.J. Thomas to Dusty Springfield to the duo Naked Eyes — recorded their songs, their most iconic collaboration was with Dionne Warwick, a young, gospel-oriented singer backup whom Bacharach met in the early ’60s on a session for the song “Mexican Divorce,” which he had written with another songwriter, Bob Hilliard, for the Drifters.

After the session, Bacharach approached Warwick and asked if she would be interested in doing demonstration records of songs he was writing with a new songwriting partner. “That was the beginning of the BDW syndrome,” Warwick told AARP The Magazine in 2014.