narrowcast: Deep Album Cuts Vol. 233: Dionne Warwick

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 233: Dionne Warwick

Dionne Warwick is one of the 2021 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Devo, Carole King, Kate Bush, Iron Maiden, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Todd Rundgren, The Go-Go's, Rage Against The Machine, New York Dolls, Chaka Khan, and Fela Kuti. Of all those artists, Warwick has been eligible the longest (only Turner and King have been recording for longer, but released their first solo albums after Warwick), and this is her first time being nominated. One wonders if her emergence in the past year as an entertaining presence on Twitter contributed to this belated recognition, but it any event it's deserved and overdue.

Dionne Warwick deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. I Cry Alone

2. Any Old Time Of Day

3. Land Of Make Believe

4. How Many Days Of Sadness

5. In Between The Heartaches

6. Here Where There is Love

7. Walk Little Dolly

8. Let Me Be Lonely

9. Wanting Things

10. Loneliness Remembers What Happiness Forgets

11. Check Out Time

12. My First Night Alone Without You

13. You're Gonna Need Me

14. I Can't Wait Until I See My Baby's Face

15. This Is Love

16. Early Morning Strangers

17. Who, What, When, Where, Why

18. We Never Said Goodbye

19. What Is This

20. You Are My Love

21. I Can Let Go Now

22. Without Your Love

23. Moments Aren't Moments

Track 1 from Presenting Dionne Warwick (1963)
Track 2 from Anyone Who Had A Heart (1964)
Track 3 from Make Way For Dionne Warwick (1964)
Track 4 from The Sensitive Sound of Dionne Warwick (1965)
Track 5 from Here I Am (1965)

Track 6 from Here Where There Is Love (1966)
Track 7 from The Windows Of The World (1967)
Track 8 from Dionne Warwick in Valley Of The Dolls 1968)

Track 9 from Promises, Promises (1968)
Track 10 from I'll Never Fall In Love Again (1970)
Track 11 from Very Dionne (1970)
Track 12 from Dionne (1972)
Track 13 from Just Being Myself (1973)
Track 14 from Then Came You (1975)
Track 15 from Track Of The Cat (1975)

Track 16 from Love At First Sight (1977)
Track 17 from Dionne (1979)
Track 18 from No Night So Long (1980)
Track 19 from Friends In Love (1982)
Track 20 from Heartbreaker (1982)

Track 21 from How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye (1983)
Track 22 from Finder Of Lost Loves (1985)
Track 23 from Friends (1985)

It's appropriate that Dionne Warwick could get in the same year as Carole King, since they're both products of the Brill Building era, with King's contemporaries Burt Bacharach and Hal David writing, producing, and arranging most of Warwick's music during the wildly successful first decade of her career. But as I dug into Warwick's catalog, I was pleasantly surprised by just how many dozens of songs Bacharach and David wrote for Warwick, many of which were never released as singles by her or anyone else. I was a teenager who worshiped Elvis Costello when he started teaming up with Burt Bacharach and championing Bacharach's '60s pop classics, which felt very far removed from even the '60s classic rock that I liked, but now I can credit Painted From Memory as the gateway for helping me appreciate how fantastic Warwick's music back then was, and how perfect a vessel her amazingly rich voice was for Bacharach and David's songs.

All of the first 12 tracks on this playlist were written by Bacharach and David, and feature some breathtakingly brilliant songs like "Check Out Time" and "Loneliness Remembers What Happiness Forgets" that I would rate up there with their best hits. In 1989, Rhino Records released The Dionne Warwick Collection: Her All-Time Greatest Hits, and followed it up with 1992's Hidden Gems: The Best of Dionne Warwick, Vol. 2. And that compilation spotlighted some of the same excellent album tracks I picked here, including "I Cry Alone," "Any Old Time Of Day," "Land Of Make Believe," "How Many Days Of Sadness," and "Let Me Be Lonely."

Dionne Warwick started branching out and working with a wider variety of writers and producers in the '70s, and her career fortunes were up and down from there. But her period apart from Burt Bacharach started off with a bang with the first song on 1973's Just Being Myself, which was written and produced by Motown's famed Holland-Dozier-Holland team. "You're Gonna Need Me" wasn't a single, but it's an absolutely enormous jam that was later sampled on Usher's "Throwback," J Dilla's "Stop," and State Property's "Want Me Back." And DJ Premier sampled "My First Night Without You" for The LOX's "Recognize."

When Warwick wasn't periodically reuniting with Bacharach, she had a pretty strong lineup of writers and producers on her albums, including Stevie Wonder ("Moments Aren't Moments"), Barry Manilow ("Early Morning Strangers"), Barry Gibb ("You Are My Love"), Michael McDonald ("I Can Let Go Now"), Mutt Lange ("Without Your Love"), and Thom Bell ("This Is Love"). A decade after Isaac Hayes dramatically reinvented one of Dionne Warwick's signature songs, "Walk On By," Hayes wrote songs for Warwick including "We Never Said Goodbye" and the hit "Deja Vu."