Take the rising major seventh first heard under the words “his bed” at 0:13, a highly dissonant interval that’s quite difficult to sing on an ‘instrument’ that has no keys or frets. ![]() The vocal line is quirky too, and far from straightforward to sing – something that Bacharach’s primary muse Dionne Warwick commented on in relation to the composer’s tunes in general. Does this help tie the bridge together with the verse musically speaking? It’s a thought-provoking question to consider, as it’s a technique that could be applied practically to fill out half-finished songs, extrapolating from, say, existing verses to missing choruses, or from existing choruses to a missing middle section. I-IV-iii-vi-ii-V outline, but adding extra Intriguingly, the bridge’s progression has a lot in common with the verse, retaining the basic Harmonically, the verse is based around a tonal cycle of fifths, leaving out just the diminished chord on theį major scale’s leading note and then repeating the That said, for me the bridges feel more like nine-bar sections too, but with a one-bar extension, and it made me wonder whether the nine-beat metre of the ‘where the hell did that come from?!’ outro at 2:25 might have been intended as a deliberate structural echo. Just the section lengths are weird to start with, comprising nine-bar verses with ten-bar bridges between them. ![]() (The song itself won the Oscar for Best Song as well.) Perhaps more surprising, given its gently reactionary ‘old-timey’ sound, is that it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the first four weeks of 1970, beating out Diana Ross & The Supremes' ‘Someday We’ll Be Together’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, Peter Paul & Mary’s ‘Leaving On A Jet Plane’, The Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’, and The Beatles' ‘Come Together/Something’.Īs an inveterate muso myself, I’d like to think that Bacharach’s penchant for unorthodox song construction helped its success. Following the recent death of Burt Bacharach, I was reminded of a little wind-up music box I had as a child that played this song of his, and how for years I thought it was just some kind of American nursery rhyme, rather than the soundtrack to a film about a pair of notorious career criminals! With hindsight, though, it’s hardly surprising that the song spawned its own merch, given that Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid was 1969’s highest-grossing film and Bacharach’s soundtrack picked up an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy for Best Original Score.
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