When Dionne Warwick Made Heartbreak Sound Effortlessly Elegant

When Dionne Warwick Made Heartbreak Sound Effortlessly Elegant

There are sad songs.

There are really sad songs.

And then there are songs that somehow manage to sound heartbroken, sophisticated and completely in control at the same time.

“Anyone Who Had a Heart” is one of those songs.

Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1963, it became the first of Warwick's recordings to break into the American Top 10. It also became one of the defining collaborations between a singer and songwriting team who seemed to have an almost unfair amount of musical chemistry.

And if you've ever wondered what happens when you combine a complicated Bacharach melody, a Hal David lyric about romantic betrayal and one of the most precise voices in popular music…

Well, heartbreak suddenly sounds rather glamorous.

A Song That Wasn't Quite Finished

The story of the song's creation is almost as interesting as the finished recording.

Bacharach had the music largely worked out, but Hal David had only written part of the lyric.

The pair were working on the song in Bacharach's Manhattan apartment when Dionne Warwick heard the unfinished music.

She apparently loved it immediately.

So much so that she encouraged David to get on with finishing the words while she worked with Bacharach on the music.

David retreated to another room and completed the lyric.

There are probably easier ways of writing a hit song.

But when you've got Dionne Warwick waiting in the next room, perhaps the pressure helps.

Burt Bacharach Wasn't Exactly Writing Nursery Rhymes

One reason Bacharach's songs remain so distinctive is that they rarely behave quite the way you expect.

“Anyone Who Had a Heart” is a perfect example.

The melody moves through changing rhythms and time signatures, creating a subtle sense that the song is constantly shifting underneath Warwick's vocal.

It's sophisticated without sounding like a mathematics lesson.

That's quite a trick.

Bacharach later described the changes as something that happened naturally while he was writing rather than being carefully engineered into the composition.

And Warwick was arguably the perfect singer to make those unusual musical ideas sound completely effortless.

Then Dionne Warwick Walked Up to the Microphone

Warwick recorded the song at Bell Sound Studios in Manhattan in November 1963, with Bacharach and David involved in the production.

And here's one of those recording stories that makes anyone who has ever spent three hours trying to get a decent vocal take feel slightly inadequate.

Warwick reportedly nailed the song in just one take.

One.

Take.

Apparently, when you've got the right singer, the right song and the right arrangement, you don't necessarily need to spend the afternoon shouting:

“Can we just do one more?”

The recording was released on Scepter Records in November 1963 and quickly began making an impression.

America Got It First

Warwick's version became her first US Top 10 hit, reaching Number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1964. It also reached the Top 10 in a number of other countries.

For Warwick, it was an important breakthrough.

She had already recorded music written by Bacharach and David, but this was the record that really established the partnership as something special.

And there was plenty more to come.

“Walk On By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and numerous other classics would follow.

But “Anyone Who Had a Heart” was one of the early signs that something rather special was happening.

Then Britain Decided to Do Things Differently

And here comes the twist.

If you were listening to the British charts in 1964, you could quite reasonably have assumed that Cilla Black was the definitive voice of the song.

Her version, produced by George Martin, went all the way to Number 1 in the UK, spending three weeks at the top. Warwick's own recording reached only Number 42 in Britain.

That must have been slightly awkward.

Imagine creating a song that becomes a major American hit, only to watch another singer take it to the top of the charts in your own country.

Pop music has never been particularly good at being fair.

Cilla's recording was also a major commercial success, becoming one of the biggest-selling singles by a female solo artist in Britain during the 1960s.

A Little Bit of Chart Competition

The success of Cilla's version eventually created some friction.

Warwick later said that her objection wasn't really to Cilla herself, but to how closely she felt the recording reproduced her own interpretation.

In a later interview, Warwick famously joked that if she'd sneezed, Cilla would have done the same.

It's a wonderfully sharp line.

And rather more entertaining than the usual polite show-business answer of:

“I'm absolutely thrilled for her.”

The two singers eventually met, and Warwick later described Cilla warmly despite the earlier disagreement.

So perhaps the moral is: never underestimate the emotional consequences of releasing the same song on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Two Great Singers, Two Very Different Memories

What makes the story particularly interesting is that both recordings have survived.

Warwick's version has that wonderfully controlled, almost conversational elegance.

Cilla's has a more overtly dramatic quality that suited the British pop market of the period.

Neither needs to be dismissed in favour of the other.

They're snapshots of two different musical worlds.

And that's one of the things I love about songs from this period.

The same composition could travel across an ocean and come back sounding like it had acquired a completely different personality.

The Bacharach-Warwick Magic

The partnership between Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach and Hal David became one of the most successful singer-songwriter-producer collaborations in popular music.

And it worked because each brought something different.

Bacharach supplied those beautiful, sometimes unpredictable melodies.

David supplied lyrics that could be conversational, sophisticated and emotionally cutting without becoming melodramatic.

And Warwick somehow made the whole thing sound natural.

That's the part I find most impressive.

You listen to a Bacharach melody on paper and you can imagine an ordinary singer getting completely lost somewhere around the second chord change.

Warwick doesn't sound remotely worried.

She simply delivers it.

A Song That Still Knows How to Hurt

More than sixty years later, “Anyone Who Had a Heart” still works because the emotion is so recognisable.

It's about disappointment.

It's about loving somebody who doesn't seem to understand what they're doing to you.

It's about that slightly ridiculous situation where your heart is screaming one thing while your dignity is desperately trying to maintain some sort of control.

In other words…

It's a love song.

We've all been there.

Or at least most of us have.

And if you haven't, congratulations. Please don't tell the rest of us.

One of Those Records That Takes You Somewhere

For me, this is exactly the kind of record that belongs on In My Life Radio.

It isn't simply a great 1960s single.

It carries the atmosphere of an era when pop music was becoming increasingly sophisticated, when songwriters were experimenting with structure and orchestration, and when singers like Warwick could turn a complicated composition into something deeply personal.

And there's something else.

Records like this become attached to memories.

You hear them years later and suddenly you're back in another room, another car, another year.

Perhaps you heard it on a parent's radio.

Perhaps it was playing in the background somewhere.

Perhaps you discovered it decades later and wondered how on earth you'd managed to miss it.

That's the magic of music.

It waits.

The Heart Still Has the Last Word

“Anyone Who Had a Heart” may have started life as an unfinished song in Burt Bacharach's apartment, but it ended up becoming a major international hit and a landmark recording for Dionne Warwick.

It also gave us one of those fascinating chart stories where the original and a cover competed for listeners on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

And that's why I never get tired of digging into the stories behind familiar records.

Because sometimes the song you thought you knew turns out to have an entirely different story hiding underneath it.

And in the case of “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” that story involves a brilliant songwriter, a lyric completed in another room, an astonishingly quick vocal recording, two great singers, a transatlantic chart battle and just a little bit of professional rivalry.

Not bad for three minutes and nine seconds.

In My Life Radio — every song has a story. Every life has a soundtrack.

The information provided in this post is for general informational and educational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, we make no representations or warranties of any kind about the completeness, reliability, or accuracy of this information. Any action you take based on the content on this blog is strictly at your own risk.