Burt Bacharach is dead at 94 years old, publicist Tina Brausam confirmed today (February 9), as the Associated Press notes. The publication notes Bacharach died in his Los Angeles home of natural causes on February 8.
Bacharach enjoyed a lengthy career that started in the 1950s, and he was still performing live as recently as 2019. He wrote or co-wrote a number of songs that remain recognizable today, including “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” (a No. 1 single for B. J. Thomas in 1970), “What The World Needs Now Is Love” (initially popularized by Jackie DeShannon’s 1965 recording), and “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” (Dionne Warwick’s 1969 recording was a top-10 hit). He had success with his own releases as well: His self-titled 1971 album peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard 200 chart.
He has received plenty of award recognition for his work. In his lifetime, he was nominated for 21 Grammy Awards, most recently just in 2022 when Burt Bacharach And Steven Sater’s Some Lovers was nominated for Best Musical Theater Album. He managed to pick up six Grammy wins, too. He also has six Academy Awards and three Emmys to his name, so all in all, he’s just a Tony Award away from achieving EGOT status.
In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Bacharach said of working with frequent collaborator Hal David (who died in 2012), “The way Hal and I worked was in fragments. We never finished the song in one day. We took our work home. If I’ve been collaborating, I need the time alone to just lie on the couch and try to hear the whole vertical picture of what this song is. There’s only one song I remember that Hal and I wrote quickly: ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.’ We were doing a show in Boston and I got pneumonia. We had good reviews, but there was work to be done and I felt like sh*t. I was put in Massachusetts General and was there nearly a week. The producer was a son of a b*tch. Really tough guy. He just said, ‘How long is he going to be in hospital? Can we put a band in his hospital room? If he’s not functioning in a week, I’ll bring in another writer.'”
This post is being updated.
