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Summer of Covers continues!
I’ve always been partial to this Naked Eyes record of “Always Something There To Remind Me.” Not because it’s the best version out there, but because it came out when I was 14 years old, slavishly listening to the radio for whatever was new and cool, and this was the first version of the song I ever heard.
The fact is though, no matter what you think of Naked Eyes, even a semi-cheesy four-hit synthpop band can’t go wrong recording a Burt Bacharach/Hal David number. Get two or three martinis in me at a convention where Tabitha Hale has everybody doing karaoke, and even I wouldn’t sound too bad trying a little Bacharach/David.
A few years later I learned that Dionne Warwick had a big hit with “Always Something” back in ’67. Of course Warwick has the chops that she didn’t have to dumb down Bacharach/David’s playful time signature, and so it’s really a much better record in every way. But if I hadn’t been listening to all that New Wave on the radio in 1983, I might never have known about Warwick and Bacharach and David.
Writing this up for you tonight I also discovered that R.B. Greaves (of “Take A Letter, Maria” fame) took a whack at this in 1970, with that patented smooth-soul-meets-Herb-Alpert sound of his.
I guess the point of all this is that Bacharach and David were such a great songwriting duo that a drunk blogger with the world’s flattest singing voice trying to sound cool in a hotel lobby bar can’t totally mess them up. So of course a professional recording artist is going to sound at least as good as Naked Eyes.
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