The Dionne Warwick Collection

Warwick, Dionne

album cover

A Chance Encounter That Led to Consummate Pop Craft

Dionne Warrick and Burt Bacharach were just two striving professionals, scuffling to get paid, when they met in a recording studio in 1961. She was part of the Gospelaires (a familial singing group that had backed Ben E. King on the monster hit "Stand by Me"), who'd been hired that day to sing backing vocals for the Drifters. He, a pianist who'd done road time with Vic Damone and Marlene Dietrich, was the author of a song the Drifters were cutting called "Mexican Divorce." Bacharach invited Warrick to sing on some pop songs he and lyricist Hal David had just written. The next year, the team's first single, "Don't Make Me Over"— one of the first songs with a feminist message to reach the Top 40 in the rock era—carried a typographical error: Warrick was identified as Warwick.

The name stuck, and so did the collaboration: Over the next eight years, through the turbulent period associated with the overlapping frenzies of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and the Summer of Love, Warwick, Bacharach, and David established an alternate pop reality, a sparkly pristine universe where poise and sophistication reigned.

That these opulent tunes, which include "Walk On By," "Do You Know the Way to San José," and the eternally slinky bossa "The Look of Love," are the result of a chance encounter is enough to make you wonder about the caprice of fate. Warwick's crystalline voice showed up at the exact moment Bacharach and David's compositional style—with its demanding intervallic leaps and torrents of words, and chord changes that hint at (but never wallow in) melancholy— began to mature. She doesn't simply sing what the two wrote; her agile, affectation-free delivery elevates the fragile melodies, making them seem at once regal and windswept. Her style is so conversational, it's easy to miss how elegantly she's shaping the music. The next time somebody complains about pop as a reckless realm of shouters and louts, insist on silence and cue up any of the twenty-four tracks here—immaculate productions that have a quiet, unassuming way of saying it all.

Genre: Pop, Vocals
Released: 2004, WEA International
Key Tracks: "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," "The Look of Love"
Catalog Choice: Promises, Promises/I'll Never Fall in Love Again.
Next Stop: Whitney Houston: Whitney Houston
After That: Amy Winehouse: Back to Black.
Book Pages: 846–847