Burt Bacharach RIP

It’s awfully hard to distill the impact of Burt Bacharach, because he’s pretty much everywhere across the pop music landscape of America over the past sixty years. Stephen Holden:

A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive.