Dionne is a magical singer,” Hal David exclaims. “She’s a very good musician.” He searches for just the right word to describe the woman who made so many of his lyrics famous. “She was a great collaborator.”
It’s an apt description. Far more than most artists who are linked to a songwriter or songwriting team, Dionne Warwick was virtually a third member of the Bacharach/David collaboration. She was so good in her role that Bacharach & David could write without any sense of constraint.
“The more I saw what she could do, the more chances I could take as a songwriter,” Bacharach said in 1995. “I could write something that could be a couple of octaves in ranch, something I wouldn’t dare do for another singer.”
“Technically, she could do almost anything,” David concurs. “She was unafraid. She was just far and away the best interpreter we had. She came to us very early in the game, and we just grew together.
“We had, over the years, recorded with some people who had wonderful voices but were surprisingly unmusical. It took forever to get it right – and sometimes [they] never [did]. With Dionne, it always came out right. It didn’t take much for her to grasp and express the nuances – the little something that’s impossible to put down on paper. You could explain it once and she would get it.”
David downplays the idea that he and Bacharach tailored songs for Warwick: “To a large extent, Burt and I just wrote songs and then we gave them to Dionne. She could do them all.”
“And she did it almost effortlessly,” Bacharach said in 1993. “The range didn’t matter. The difficulty didn’t matter. I don’t think there was another singer who could have listened, taken direction, and then delivered the way Dionne did.”
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