Music |
The Dionne Warwick Collection
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Soul
How can you tell if you’re young?
Well, when you think of Dionne Warwick, do you think of those infomercials for the Psychic Friends Network?
Is the last thing you remember about Dionne that pot bust in Miami?
Is ‘That’s What Friends Are For?’ her only hit song you can remember?
Did your parents sing ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’ on car trips in your childhood?
If you can answer ‘yes’ to most of those questions, you’re young.
The rest of you — you know: Dionne Warwick was the biggest name in the Golden Age of pop music. Which was the l960s, when there still was a music business and the dream of every musician was a hit single.
The rest of you — you know: Dionne Warwick was the biggest name in the Golden Age of pop music. Which was the l960s, when there still was a music business and the dream of every musician was a hit single.
Like just about every black singer of note, Dionne started young. As a teen, she sang with the Gospelaires, a mid-’50s gospel-singing group that included her aunt, Cissy Houston (now remembered mostly as Whitney’s mother). In 1962, the group was backing up The Drifters when Bacharach heard them and invited Dionne to record some demos. She knocked them out of the park and soon made her first single, ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ — maybe you’ve heard of it.
If you will click on the link, you will see the names of 24 songs. In fact, you know many of them; they are mainstays of our pop culture. But they’re more than audio Kleenex, as you will discover if you listen to them with headphones — they are stunningly original compositions, performed and recorded at a level that can, without hype, be called ‘art.’ Just listen, to cite just one example, to the drumming on ‘Always Something There to Remind Me.’ And some of the harmonies sound stunningly close to Renaissance church compositions.
Dionne Warwick was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001. She’s a one-off: the only singer in that exalted group who never published a song of her own. Her genius was her ability to turn any songwriter’s work into a classic — her version of a song is so authoritative that woe be to the fool who records a cover version. The lovely thing about her work: for all the thought and preparation that went into those songs, she makes them sound…effortless.
This is music you play when you want to de-stress without having to listen to something mindless. The topics of these songs are the old standbys — love and loss — but they sound, as a group, joyful. Or is it that any David/Bacharach composition that Dionne Warwick might sing would be so well done that it would make us happy? Is it completely insane to compare these songs to…Sinatra?
There’s only one way for you kids to find out. The geezers? They have a clue. But they need this CD just as much as the young folks — that old 8-track don’t work no more.
To buy ‘ The Dionne Warwick Collection’ from Amazon.com, click here.
