Song Lyric of the Day (Bacharach and David, on the ‘Dream in Your Heart’)

“Fame and fortune is a magnet

It can pull you far away from home

With a dream in your heart you're never alone.”— "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," music by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David, recorded by Dionne Warwick for her Valley of the Dolls LP (1968)

Bacharach’s effervescent melody and Warwick’s lighter-than-air vocals can only go so far in camouflaging David’s melancholy, even searing lyric about a disappointed dreamer returning home.

Celebrity can happen virtually overnight, but it’s a big if, and in the meantime “weeks turn into years.” In the freeway culture of Southern California, those looking for the big time may be as likely, in this setting, to be pumping gas as waiting on tables.

It’s all insubstantial and transitory. In the end, the song’s symbol of home, San Jose (not the high-tech center it is now, but a farming community filled with orchids), feels as elusive as L.A.

So, why waste one’s life and stick around for a quest so empty and unfulfilling for so many? It’s that single line, the song’s single light in the darkness: “With a dream in your heart you're never alone.” The songwriting partners could surely relate to that, with Bacharach noting that he “knew  all nine floors” of New York’s fabled Brill Building, where he had to endure constant rejection from the music publishers gathered there.

Warwick did not warm to these lyrics. “It was not one of my favorite songs that Hal David wrote,” she told People Magazine’s Liz McNeil in a 2019 interview. “I just couldn’t imagine Hal writing a lyric that had ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa….'”

Her lack of faith in the song manifested itself initially in her first try at it. “When she performed it at the recording session, I think it was the only time during that period we didn't get a vocal from her that was good enough to use,” Bacharach recalled for Michael Fremer in a 1985 interview for Analog Planet Magazine. “So we had to bring her back into the studio to have her overdub her vocals."

The songwriting duo’s persuasion finally produced the desired result. "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" (asked rhetorically, so, oddly enough, there’s no question mark in the title) sold 3.5 million copies and earned Warwick a Grammy for Best Contemporary-Pop Vocal Performance, Female.

Or, as the singer told McNeil laughingly, she “cried all the way to the bank. What can I tell you?”

(The image accompanying this post shows David on the left and Bacharach on the right, with Warwick between them—anchoring this picture, as she did with so many of their songs.)