Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music

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Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music

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Overview

Burt Bacharach is one of the most celebrated and legendary song-writers of the twentieth century. Throughout his sixty year career he has worked with artists from Dionne Warwick to Dr Dre, Marlene Dietrich to Elvis Costello. Anyone Who Had a Heart is the story of one of the greatest song writers of all time. It traces for the first time in his own words, the life and times of the man who created the music that has become the sound track for the lives of his millions of devoted fans all over the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857898043
Publisher:	Atlantic Books Ltd
Publication date:	06/06/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Burt Bacharach has had seventy Top Forty hits, won three Academy Awards, eight Grammys and an Emmy. He was recently given the prestigious Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, an award previously won by Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney.

Prologue: Nikki 1

1 The Story of My Life 5

2 Night Plane to Heaven 22

3 I Married an Angel 30

4 Warm and Tender 42

5 The Blue Angel 50

6 Baby, It's You 64

7 Make It Easy on Yourself 74

8 Land of Make Believe 82

9 What's New Pussycat? 96

10 Love, Sweet Love 104

11 What's It All About? 115

12 The Look of Love 122

13 I'll Never Fall in Love Again 131

14 Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head 143

15 Lost Horizon 154

16 Only Love Can Break a Heart 161

17 Best That You Can Do 168

18 That's What Friends Are For 181

19 Anyone Who Had a Heart 193

20 This Guy's in Love with You 201

21 Battle Royal 212

22 God Give Me Strength 219

23 Man of Mystery 230

24 Overture 2000 235

25 Nikki, It's You 242

26 Night and Day 249

27 What the World Needs Now 254

28 The Gershwin Prize 266

Epilogue: Happy 279

Acknowledgments 281

Sources 283

Index 285

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Editorial Reviews

Though he’s clearly a gifted songwriter, Bacharach as a memoirist disappoints. While Bacharach, writing with Greenfield, certainly has a story to tell (he was married to Angie Dickinson; toured with Marlene Dietrich; wrote mega-hits like “Walk on By” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”; won Grammys and Oscars), he’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of his book to really dig in and tell readers what it was like to cut his teeth in the infamous Brill Building, work with (and sever ties with) his frequent collaborator Hal David, or even address his daughter’s battle with Asperger’s and depression that led her to commit suicide; he prefers to let Angie Dickinson and others do most of the talking. Bacharach spends more time talking about his tennis game and various marriages than his approach to songwriting (much more detail is given to who he worked with on a particular song than the song itself) . Moments of humility and candor, such as a blown opportunity to work with Sinatra, peek through, but it’s not enough to save what could have been an illuminating work on many levels. Amy Schiffman, Intellectual Property Group. (May)

Publishers Weekly

This chatty autobiography…tracks the famed composer’s life and career from childhood to the present day.… [H]is contributions to popular music of the twentieth century have been inarguably significant.

Booklist

Absorbing.

Rolling Stone

Reminiscences of a master songwriter. Compiled from interviews conducted by journalist Greenfield (The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun, 2011, etc.) with Bacharach and his associates, this oral memoir provides a congenial overview of a life devoted to music. Bacharach began reluctantly taking piano lessons as a child, then became smitten with classical and jazz compositions; they would later inspire him to bring a sophisticated palette to his own songs. After a few unspectacular years at the Brill Building, he hit the jackpot with lyricist Hal David; the two went on to create such iconic hits as "Baby, It's You" for the Shirelles, "The Look of Love" for Dusty Springfield and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" for B.J. Thomas. Bacharach candidly details his transformation into a household name, his perfectionism in the recording studio and his sometimes-contentious relationships with David and the indomitable Dionne Warwick. The chanteuse acted as a muse for the pair and was aggrieved when they broke up their songwriting partnership after the colossal failure of their score for the 1973 box office bomb Lost Horizon. For decades, breaking up relationships was a specialty of Bacharach's; many of the women in his life, including his first three wives, describe him as exuding a combination of ambition, ambivalence and arrogance. The most moving recollections come from Marlene Dietrich, who highly valued Bacharach as her conductor and accompanist on the road, and from ex-wife Angie Dickinson, who laments Bacharach's decision to institutionalize their autistic daughter, Nikki. The specter of Nikki (who committed suicide in 2007) casts a shadow over the memoir. Whether Greenfield has purposely arranged the book this way or not, intertwining Dickinson's interviews with Bacharach's commentary paints a darker picture of the man whom most people identify with catchy love songs and cameo appearances in the Austin Powers films. Illuminating and gritty, though Bacharach's remarks are occasionally self-serving.

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Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music

Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music

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