Various Artists - Covered: Burt Bacharach & Hal David, Volume 4: 1969-1975

I'm going to go ahead and post the rest of my series on the best songs of Burt Bacharach and/or Hal David today. So here's the fourth out of five albums.

In the time period at the start of this album, the Bacharach-David songwriting partnership was still going strong. Dionne Warwick was still their main vehicle for getting hits. Note that, as with the other albums in this series, I'm avoiding including Warwick versions of these songs on the assumption that fans of this type of music have those already. I did include two songs done by Warwick though, "The Green Grass Starts to Grow" and "Plastic City," because I couldn't find any other versions.

However, the glory days were coming to an end. Bacharach and David had a falling out with Warwick around 1971, though I don't know the reasons for it. Then Bacharach and David had a falling out with each other around 1973, when a musical score they worked on, "Lost Horizon," was a critical and commercial failure. They wrote a couple of songs together many years later, but none of those were good enough to be included.

Around this same time, the two of them seemed to lose their musical mojo. For the rest of the 1970s, both of them had very few successes, and their style fell out of fashion. "Plastic City" is a song recorded in 1974 by Warwick during a tentative reunion with Bacharach (but not David). However, the song (and two other Bacharach tunes she recorded that year) weren't released until decades later. "99 Miles from L.A." was co-written by David without Bacharach, and was a minor hit for Albert Hammond in 1975. After that, my next album in this series begins in 1981, which shows was a dry spell they had.

Clearly, the two of them did better when working together. Happily, the vast majority of this music still covers the last of their glory years as a songwriting team.

01 I'll Never Fall in Love Again (Bobbie Gentry)
02 Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head (B. J. Thomas)
03 We Have All the Time in the World (Louis Armstrong)
04 Walk On By (Isaac Hayes)
05 In the Land of Make Believe (Dusty Springfield)
06 One Less Bell to Answer (5th Dimension)
07 The April Fools (Cilla Black)
08 Odds and Ends (Johnny Mathis)
09 [They Long to Be] Close to You (Carpenters)
10 The Green Grass Starts to Grow (Dionne Warwick)
11 A House Is Not a Home (Dusty Springfield & Burt Bacharach)
12 Something Big (Mark Lindsay)
13 Send a Little Love My Way (Anne Murray)
14 Loneliness Remembers What Happiness Forgets (Stephanie Mills)
15 You'll Never Get To Heaven [If You Break My Heart] (Stylistics)
16 Plastic City (Dionne Warwick)
17 99 Miles from L.A. (Albert Hammond)

https://www.imagenetz.de/f5Egy

Yeay! Finally, I'm able to show a real, undoctored color photo of Bacharach and David together. The photo for the cover art is from the 1969 Academy Awards ceremony.