Bacharach still feels drawn to write, perform songs

When what you do for a living matters as much to you as writing music matters to Burt Bacharach, the idea of retirement is a nonstarter. Bacharach has been working as an artist for more than 60 years, and meaningful opportunities continue to arise.

Bacharach returns to Hawaii on Thursday for four nights at Blue Note Hawaii. At 89 he said he still feels drawn to play for an audience.

“Something I feel very strongly about is being able to play my music for people,” he said. “It makes me feel good to get on stage and make some people feel good in a moment in time or touch them or touch their heart or their emotions.

“In these times I need to do something — as a form of resistance, you might say.”

BACHARACH WROTE his first hit, “The Story of My Life,” in 1957. His most recent work is an original 30-minute score for the film “A Boy Called Po,” which was released Sept. 1.

The film follows the experiences of an overworked widower and his autistic son, Patrick, who is bullied at school and retreats into a fantasy.

Bacharach said the topic hit home for him.

He wrote the score “basically for nothing, simply because of the subject matter,” he said, in a call from his Southern California residence.

“This was a film that was very important to me to do because he’s autistic, and it deals with the issues of him going to school and what he goes through, and what the single father raising him goes through.

“When I was married to Angie Dickinson, we had a daughter, Nikki, and when Nikki was born nobody had ever heard of autism,” Bacharach said. “But it turned out that she was very autistic and had Asperger’s. She killed herself because the pain and the craziness was just too much.”

Nikki Bacharach died in 2007, at age 40.

Bacharach collaborated with lyricist Billy Mann on the movie’s theme song, “Dancing With Your Shadow,” which is sung by Sheryl Crow.

“Sheryl Crow did a beautiful job with the song,” he said. “What we’re in for and we’re all on board for is raising awareness of autism and to help us understand better the thing that autism is. When Nikki was born, we hadn’t heard of anything like this — and now something like one in 66 kids are born with autism. It’s large. It’s a pretty big number.”

A SOLO Bacharach performance, with the artist accompanying himself on piano, can be a great experience, but he’s scaling it up for the Blue Note and taking the stage with a band and backing singers. He acknowledged that the biggest problem is planning the set list.

“We do about two hours, and it’s always a question: Do you do the whole song, or do you do it in medley form so the people at least get a taste of a song that they might miss if you only did 14 songs? We do a lot of music.”

For some fans the night won’t be complete if they don’t hear all the hits Bacharach and his longtime writing partner, lyricist Hal David, wrote for Dionne Warwick. Played in their entirety, from “Don’t Make Me Over” through “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and with detours for all the great songs that could have been hits for Warwick had they been released as singles, the Warwick era would be a major part of the show.

But that would only be an introduction to Bacharach’s tremendous body of pop chart hits. How about “Tower of Strength,” a Top 5 hit for Gene McDaniels in 1961, or “Baby It’s You,” a Top 10 hit for the Shirelles that same year, later recorded by the Beatles? Or “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance,” a Top 5 hit for Gene Pitney?

Then there’s “What’s New Pussycat?” from the film of the same name, which stands as Tom Jones’ second-biggest hit single on the American pop charts. Or another famous film song, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” the breakout hit for B.J. Thomas from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

And, jumping to the 1980s, how about “Arthur’s Theme (Best You Can Do)” and “That’s What Friends Are For,” which brought Bacharach and Warwick back together again?

Recalling the success of “What the World Needs Now is Love,” Jackie DeShannon’s first Top 10 hit, Bacharach said Warwick could have recorded it but turned it down.

“She got first call on everything that we were writing,” he recalled.

Asked about the origins of another Bacharach-David song, Bacharach wasn’t sure how he and David came up with “Me Japanese Boy I Love You,” a musical footnote in the career of Bobby Goldsboro that was probably bigger in Hawaii than anywhere on the mainland.

LOOKING FORWARD, Bacharach said that, yes, of course, he’s continuing to write and tour.

“Neil Simon, who we wrote ‘Promises, Promises’ with, always told me that the thing that writers have is, as long as they don’t get fat — fat in the sense that they just keep repeating what they did 30 years ago and don’t grow — the natural process is that the writer will grow.

“It’s not like a football player or a boxer whose career is over at 31 or 32,” Bacharach said. “When I’m finished talking with you, I’m back to the piano.”

“It’s a very different music business now, as you know, but it’s important for me to write,” he said. “I’ve got the choice, really, of going to the piano, closing the door and playing — and not turning on MSNBC, ’cause I’m gonna get in a different place.

“And so it kind of is a form of resistance, and I’ll keep it that way.”