I will let more sophisticated music writers praise the melodic complexity that Burt Bacharach brought to the pop song and the way he and his work with lyricist Hal David presaged the blurring of high art and kitsch, of Paul Simon and tiki lamps. I celebrate a legacy that allowed Marie Dionne Warwick to express emotions as complex and paradoxical as thought itself. Singing “Walk On By,” “Are You There (With Another Girl),” and “The April Fools,” she abjures the wilted, devastating sadness of Bacharach-David’s second-best interpreter Dusty Springfield; she instead projects several emotions at once, including a tang of self-mockery, as if to say, I can’t believe I’m bothering to feel a thing about this jerk, heh. In “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” Warwick sings as if she’s whistling in the shower, or like murmuring a nursery rhyme in bed. To suggest that Warwick-Bacharach-Davis are as epochal in the development of pop music as Summer-Moroder-Bellotte a decade later.
To assemble a list of the Warwick-Bacharach-David triumphs and not include “The Look of Love” and “Promises, Promises,” is some perverse shit, and I didn’t even try. I made room for recent discoveries like “Odds and Ends,” a typically lilting melody set to a typically precise lyric which comments on its own composition: Bacharach-David tunes included anything but odds and ends. Also: “Paper Maché,” heard once on a muzak station my eighth grade and struck by the title conceit, then re-discovered in December. Of course Dionne Warwick would sing a Bacharach-David song called “Paper Maché.” The opening rhythm (played on marimba?) anticipates ’90s film soundtracks.
Committed to professionalism as craft and bank statement, Bacharach lent his music and pedigree to some of the most anonymous dreck of the next two decades. About the love ballad written for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and the theme for the Harry Hamlin-Kate Jackson-Michael Otkean homosexual drama Making Love I will pass over. Their work with Gene Pitney deserves more attention: that giddy quaver and their arrangements worked better than I thought. The yuppie-era woe-is-me-behind-the-blinds smash “On My Own” does too. And at a time when men and women preferred hospital staff to carry out the corpses of their dead sons in body bags than taint their religious self-regard, “That’s What Friends Are For” is like a dog licking your hand, your grandmother’s sloppy kiss: embarrassing in public, most welcome anyway.
A Warwick-Bacharach-David Baker’s Dozen:
1. Are You There (With Another Girl)
2. Walk On By
3. Don’t Make Me Over
4. Odds and Ends
5. A House is Not a Home
6. The April Fools
7. Paper Mache
8. Promises, Promises
9. This Girl’s in Love with You
10. Trains and Plains and Boats
11. (There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me
12. I’ll Never Fall in Love Again
13. Anyone Who Had a Heart
Bacharach For Others::
1. Dusty Springfield – I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself
2. Gene Pitney – (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance
3. Ronnie Milsap – Any Day Now
4. Jackie DeShannon – What the World Needs Now Is Love
5. The Shirelles – Baby It’s You
6. The Drifters – In The Land Of Make Believe
7. Tom Jones – Promise Her Anything
8. Dusty Springfield – The Look of Love
9. Elvis Costello – I Still Have That Other Girl
10. Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald – On My Own
Humanizing The Vacuum 
Warwick was his most prolific interpreter but I actually prefer Brook Benton’s version of “A House is Not a Home” and Cilla Black’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” No matter who sings, though, Bacharach always brought out their best.
And of courser there’s Luther Vandross’ version.