Odds and Ends of a Beautiful Lyricist

And so farewell to one of the greats. Mister Steyn has been posting his appreciations here and here. Nothing to disagree with there.

For me, Hal David was as good a lyricist as any. With his writing partner, Burt Bacharach, they were the inheritors of the Great American Songbook tradition: smart, funny, carefully crafted songs.

“What do you get when you kiss a guy?
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do, he’ll never phone ya
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again" 

That’s from their one and only Broadway show, Promises Promises, and, for Broadway’s sake, it’s a shame they didn’t stick with musical theatre. Their songs seem closer in spirit to the Tin Pan Alley tradition than, say, rock ‘n’ roll. You’d never find that “pneumonia/phone ya” rhyme in a rock song.

 If Hal David was a lyricist from the old school then it wasn’t really from the sophisticated Cole Porter academy. In interviews he spoke about his love of the Irving Berlin waltzes: “Always”, “What’ll I do?”. The same simplicity and directness can be found in his own 3\4 number:

“What the world needs now
 Is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing
 That there’s just too little of” 

Aside from the Berlin influence, what else makes a Hal David lyric a Hal David lyric? Well, there’s the domesticity. Bacharach’s music is, in songwriting terms, ambitious and precise with unusual shifts in harmony and unexpected time signatures. Arty and poetic lyrics would draw too much attention to the arty nature of the music (as is the case with his Elvis Costello collaboration “Painted from Memory”. But with a Hal David lyric, the music is grounded in the everyday:

“The moment I wake up
Before I put on my make up
I Say a Little Prayer for You" 

That’s pretty typical. And those typical staccato, off-beat phrases require the easiest kind of lyric to be effective.

The final ingredient is the song titles. A title is vital, as Ira Gershwin said, and Hal David had some of the best: “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “Always Something There to Remind Me”, “Don’t Make Me Over” and my personal favourite, “Odds and Ends of a Beautiful Love Affair”. These are the kind of titles that most lyricists would kill for. They encapsulate their songs in language that’s immediate and precise. They don’t look like much on the page but when they’re sung they come alive.

In twenty years time most of the 1960s chart music will sound as oddly old-fashioned as Victorian music hall does today. But somebody somewhere will still be discovering afresh the easy beauty of a Bacharach-David song.

Magic Moments indeed.