10. Alfie

Dionne Warwick (Scepter single, 1966 b/w “The Beginning of Loneliness”); composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David

It almost figures that the definitive version of this song was the B-side of a single no one remembers. Apart from Sonny Rollins’ great instrumental score, the woeful version included in the film's actual soundtrack was sung by Cher, produced by Sonny (Bono), and sounded it. Cilla Black had a hit in the UK with the same arrangement that Bacharach did for Dionne, but Dionne’s is the version that actually sounds like its own movie – possibly one quite different from the one it was written for. The philosophical commonplaces in Hal David’s lyrics fit the story well enough, but Burt Bacharach’s weirdly obsessive way of setting those words, adding extra beats and fractions of measures in different successive time signatures, to custom fit melodies to the phrases as written rather than suspending the words from a supple but set meter, makes the song’s truisms about the importance of love and just being nice to people sound like metaphysical propositions just because they are set to melodic lines that curl like Art Nouveau ironwork – lighter than air except that they weigh a ton. Both Ned Rorem and Miles Davis thought so. And only Dionne Warwick could sing those words that way.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).