Who Wrote Do You Know the Way to San Jose
Listen to this rail by serial hit unmarried pure popular vocaliser and future Solid Gold/Psychic Friends Network Television personality Dionne Warwick. It'southward "Do You Know The Way To San Jose", her ginormous 1968 hit song equally written by herculean songwriting squad Burt Bacharach and Hal David with whom Warwick famously collaborated during the 1960s and into the early seventies. The song appears on her LP Dionne Warwick in the Valley of the Dolls.
Lyricist David penned the words to this vocal after Bacharach wrote the melody. He decided to write almost the town of San Jose, California where he'd once been stationed in the navy, having practiced memories of his time there. Warwick was initially unconvinced of the song'southward hit potential. After all, she was following upwards "I Say A Piddling Prayer", even so another huge boom hit, so the pressure was on. Bacharach and David convinced her to record it anyway, and information technology scored her a third consecutive number one song on the Billboard charts.
Even after decades of performing it, and despite the success it represented for her, Warwick never really warmed to it. She considered it to be fluff. Yet, this vocal isn't all that it seems. It's one of those songs that sounds happy, but isn't, full of all kinds of pain and heartache under its supremely informal outside.
Even if Hal David wrote this song as a tribute to his memories spent in the titular city, this isn't exactly the straightest line to become at that place. This song isn't just a musical travel brochure that it might seem on first listen. Bacharach's music that's characterized by his patented playfulness with fourth dimension signatures and shifting Brazilian-influenced rhythms draws one's attention away from the underlying story to be constitute in David's text. This song moves from starry-eyed fantasy to cold reality all in the space of three minutes. It is the story of a hopeful who longs for the bright lights of a bigger city far abroad, who finds that life in that place is inhospitable forcing a return to the home she knew as her dreams turn to dust.
In this vocal, fame is a "magnet that draws yous far away from home", an irresistible force for those who have a dream in their middle to make a proper noun for oneself. The promise of a week or ii, so the achievement of stardom turns into years, apace passing and faster than i thought. So, friendless, it'due south fourth dimension to render home for some peace of mind, or the hopes of it. In the end, this is not a song of celebration. It's a song of retreat, thwarting, and cynicism, fifty-fifty if information technology doesn't audio that style. The final line "I tin't wait to get back to San Jose" is intriguingly ambiguous. Is the narrator really relieved to be out of the not bad big freeway that is Fifty.A? Or, are they kidding themselves that life in their hometown is practiced enough for her in commutation for her lost dreams of fame? The music seems to suggest the latter to me.
It's interesting that Warwick found this song to be too lite to exist taken seriously. It'south every bit if even she was distracted past the jubilant woah-woah woah-woahs, and la-la-las that make "Exercise You Know the Fashion to San Jose" audio and so summery and light as air. Mayhap information technology was because she was a ascent pop star with a string of hits to her name, insulated from the story that this song tells by the time she came to record it; that fame seekers are a only one car each on a vast highway, more often than not ending up parking cars and pumping gas instead of racing forwards to catch the fame-game prize. Alternatively, maybe she acknowledged the darkness at the center of this song, put off by how arguably unsympathetic the music is to the story it'due south telling. Who knows? Only Dionne Warwick, I approximate.
Warwick would have several hits after this ane, working with Bacharach and David up until the early seventies at which time the songwriters' partnership dissolved. She'd accept a hitting in 1974's "Then Came You", produced by Philly Soul magnate Thom Bell, and also featuring The Spinners who were on the cusp of a classic period at the time. Into the early eighties, she'd have a huge hit with "Heartbreaker", written by the Bee Gees, and featuring Barry Gibb on bankroll vocals. That would be notwithstanding another vocal she didn't specially care for, somehow. All the same it as well would be a huge hit. Another high indicate was her part in "That's What Friends Are For", a single to raise money and awareness of the AIDS epidemic by the mid-1980s, written past Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. All the while, her young cousin Whitney Houston was on her style to taking the charts by storm, as Warwick herself had done twenty years earlier. Fame would take its toll there, too, although in a unlike way.
After a period as a TV personality, Warwick was back every bit a vocalist and performer by the early nineties. This song. "Do Yous Know The Way To San Jose" would continue to be one of her live staples, surrounded in breezy sixties nostalgia that added however another layer to hide the disappointment and sense of defeat that lay at its center.
Dionne Warwick is an agile performer today. Learn more virtually her at dionnewarwickinternationalfanclub.com.
Relish!
Source: https://thedeletebin.com/2017/07/17/dionne-warwick-sings-do-you-know-the-way-to-san-jose/
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