He's one of the greatest hitmakers in pop history, but Burt Bacharach doesn't care if his new album attacking the Bush administration loses him fans. He just had to make it, he tells Brian Boyd
WHEN you hear that Burt Bacharach's new album is a collaboration with Dr Dre, there's really only one opening question: "Yo, Burt, I believe you worked with Dre on the new album. What are you going to call it - Do You Know the Way to San José, Motherfucker?" Very fortunately he's OK with the question. In fact, he laughs and says: "Sadly, I already have a title and it's been printed up already".
Silly people would tend to view Bacharach and Dre as polar opposites. It's not the case. Both have a rare gift for melodiously stacking up arrangements. Both represent a musical generation.
The Dr Dre angle on the album, it turns out, has been overplayed somewhat. There was, somewhere along the line, an idea of a full-on collaboration, but that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. Instead, Bacharach is using Dre's drum'n'bass loops on three tracks.
It's the least surprising aspect of the album. On At This Time, Bacharach writes the lyrics and sings - both very rare events in his six-decade-long recording career. It's also a political album, a bitter attack on the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. Although lyrically Bacharach now finds himself more in Nine Inch Nails territory, the music is still resplendently lush and orchestral - which makes At This Time all the more weirdly wonderful.
"When people first hear it, there is a bit of a shock," he says. "Everyone is asking why this man who is known for writing love songs all his life is suddenly making a political album. First thing is, it's not really political. The album title sums it up. At This Time . . . it's a snapshot of where we are now and what is happening around us. It's sort of more existential than anything else, it's the voice of someone who feels very disappointed and, yes, betrayed by what is happening now.
"I just had to speak out. That's why I wrote the lyrics. I had to do it. This is very personal to me. This is the most passionate album I have ever made."
It was a journey that started five years ago, when Al Gore lost out to George W Bush in the US Presidential election. "I thought that was a bit strange," Bacharach says. "I thought we were being shafted. There was something wrong with how they counted that. Remember, I have never been a person who made speeches about anything; I never even used to vote. As things went on and the Iraq situation started, I began to get really concerned. I felt let down and duped by the Bush government about the war.
"Initially, I was in favour of the war. Then, we get all the reports about there being no weapons of mass destruction. I felt lied to and cheated. A lot of the good guys seemed to be disappearing and I felt I had to say something."
Say something he certainly does on the album's most talked about song, Who Are These People?, which is sung by Elvis Costello. Sample lyric:
Who are these people that keep telling us lies?
And how did these people get control of our lives?
And who'll stop the violence 'cause it's out of control?
This stupid mess we're in just keeps getting worse
So many people dying needlessly
Looks like the liars may inherit the earth
Even pretending to pray
And getting away with it.
"That's the song getting the attention because of the word 'lies'. What's interesting about the song is that initially we had Elvis finishing the song with the line 'What the fuck is going on?' because that's really how I felt about the whole Iraq situation. After a bit of a thought, we left it off. I'm not against swearing in songs at all. We just felt it would get too many 'Bacharach swears' mentions and take away from what the song is about.
"The other thing about that song is that when the strings come in after Elvis stops singing, we went for this Nero fiddles while Rome burns feel."
The other main cameo on the album comes from Rufus Wainwright, who sings Go Ask Shakespeare. "That's more the confused/perplexed me coming through on that song," Bacharach says. "We have Rufus singing 'I keep hoping for a better day/It's a long time coming but I wait anyway/Life's a foolish tale/I don't know - go ask Shakespeare'. It's about the sheer hopelessness of a situation, any situation - be it political or not."
Now 77, the man who was once memorably described by rock biographer Albert Goldman as "the pathos at the heart of the American hullabaloo" has made a massive contribution to the contemporary musical canon. With long-time lyricist Hal David, songs such as I Say a Little Prayer, What the World Needs Now, Close to You, Anyone Who Had a Heart and I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself put Bacharach into the classic composer company of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Leiber/Stoller - 48 Top 10 hits, nine No 1s, more than 500 compositions in total, a 47-year run on the charts.
Despite everything, the perception remains that Bacharach is a light songwriter, a purveyor of laid-back, diet-jazz lounge music. But a closer inspection of his music reveals a technical sophistication and a truly adventurous spirit. In Bacharach songs, time signatures shift, bitonal harmonies come and go at leisure, and melodies are asymmetrical. Bacharach could talk you under the table about 12-tone dissonance (he once studied with John Cage), but is happier explaining how he got his sound from a mix of Dizzy Gillespie bebop and Brazilian salsa.
Of German/Jewish extraction, Bacharach grew up in New York. He was first switched on to music in the late 1940s by hanging out in Manhattan jazz bars, watching Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk play. "They woke me up, they were my heroes," he says. He studied music in Canada and was particularly impressed by the advice of one tutorwho told him: "Never be ashamed to write a melody that people can remember" - an edict he has remained true to throughout his career.
Bacharach learnt about pop composition at the famed Brill Building in New York. Once he hooked up with Hal David the hits began, starting with Magic Moments for Perry Como. He and David later transferred their attentions to Dionne Warwick, who became the main beneficiary of their prodigious output.
"I was never a political animal growing up," Bacharach says. "There'd be the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War. I was never on any of the marches. I was writing songs with the word 'love' in the title. It was different then. The first thing that started me thinking about how to approach this album was a meeting with Rob Stringer [the head of Sony/BMG in the UK], who is one of the few real music men left. He told me not to worry about writing songs that would get radio play, to do something different, but to take a risk.
"At the same time, I found myself working in the same studio as Dr Dre. He's an amazing producer and we talked about doing stuff together. He had these drum'n'bass loops that he wanted to give me to see if I could do anything with them. These were four-note basslines that kept repeating through the song and I was interested to see if I could do something over them - music that still fitted with my jazz and classical roots.
"Lyrically, there were things I needed to say, and having been released from the pressure of worrying about radioplay or having hits off the album, I put it all down. How I felt about what was happening, about the government, about the war. So I started from my own thoughts and adapted the music to those, rather than shape it for radio programmers. There's some pretty strong stuff in there."
Not least on the elegiac Where Did It Go?, where Bacharach softly croons about how changed the world is, about how he could once "ride the subway and never be afraid". Towards the end of the song he asks "How did we end up in this place?" and it sounds for a moment like he is crying.
"I am crying on that song. We recorded it live, in front of an orchestra, and I wasreally moved. That's the whole album there, the whole betrayal of everything we once stood for. You know we expected something after the changes in the 1960s - expected a better place - and now look what's happening. That song is a real lament."
Between the writing and recording of the album, he says world events just seemed to be getting worse. And once the album was finished it was Hurricane Katrina. "I simply can't believe no-one in the present administration was heeding those warnings in the months before the hurricane. That New Orleans would be engulfed, that you would have bodies floating around. The funding that should have been there was taken away and used to fight this stupid, useless war. It really is unforgivable."
Still somewhat surprised at himself for having written a "protest" album, Bacharach makes the point that it's not an angry record, merely his own personal and impassioned take on the actions of his government.
"I knew all about protest songs in the 1960s, but this doesn't sound anything like that," he says. "There's a groove going on, a nice groove. What's really different is me in the middle of it going 'What's going on here?'"
Given the treatment meted out to The Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen for speaking out against the Bush administration, is he concerned about a backlash or upsetting his fan base? "It's ridiculous - people are saying stuff like 'don't say that because look at what happened to this person'. The way I see it is that if I lose a portion of fans over this, well, fine.
"Who knows how this will be accepted or not accepted? I just know this was the album I had to make."
