Flashback, September 1998: Costello, Bacharach Release Searing Songs of Heartbreak

Twenty-five years ago this month, two songwriters who few could have predicted, two decades before, would ever collaborate released Painted From Memory, a CD that won a Grammy and recharged their creative energy. 

The album yielded a dozen tightly crafted pop songs and considerable creative satisfaction for Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. If their artistic union went swimmingly, the same could hardly be said of the romantic betrayal, pain, hurt, and regret present on every song in this collection, courtesy of this unlikely duo’s relationships with the six wives they had already had to this point. 

Understandably, Costello has made no bones about these songs being “excessively personal.”

When Costello burst on the music scene in the late 1970s, he quickly gained a reputation for rapid-fire, blistering tunes that matched his reputation at the time as a surly young new wave artist. In the same period, Bacharach found himself experiencing a case of the middle-aged crazies, having split from his second wife, actress Angie Dickinson, and his longtime lyricist, Hal David.

Twenty years later, they were in different places, musically and mentally. Costello had gained a well-deserved reputation for being among the most versatile and musically adventurous musicians of his generation, collaborating with country, jazz, hip-hop, classical music, and R&B artists. Bacharach was seeing something of a career revival, with his songs from three decades before receiving renewed exposure in film hits like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Costello had long been a fan of Bacharach, more than 25 years his senior, and had even played “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” early on in concert. He finally met Bacharach in 1989 when the two recorded at the same studio.

But what brought the pair together to work was the 1996 film Grace of My Heart, set in the Brill Building songwriting factory of the late Fifties and early Sixties—an environment that had bred, among others, Bacharach and David.

Bacharach had already been engaged to write the music for the song intended for the movie’s Carole King-like protagonist when Costello came on board to write the lyrics. They worked long distance, exchanging lyrics and arrangements via fax.

The result, “God Give Me Strength” (featuring the voice of Kristen Vigard but lip-synched by Illeana Douglas), was a distinct high point in the movie. Thankfully, it didn’t stop there.

As Costello noted in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, “To have written a song like ‘God Give Me Strength’ and simply stopped would have been ridiculous, so about a year later we began a series of writing sessions, the first at Burt’s work studio near Santa Monica and later in a hotel suite on Park Avenue… One of us would lead the way with an opening statement, perhaps a verse or even all the way through a refrain, and the other would naturally follow with an ever more elaborate bridge of resolution, but as the exchange of ideas got faster and faster, we found ourselves completing each other’s musical sentences at the piano.”

If two words could summarize the creative fusion between the two, it would be “painstaking” and “accommodation.”

The two song craftsmen were used to creating the most intricate examples of their specialties: Costello, twisty lyrics spitting out satire, sarcasm, and wordplay; Bacharach, irresistible hooks that masked complicated arrangements filled with changing time signatures and irregular phrasing, all somehow refined from his classical music training and love of bebop.

In Bacharach, Costello found a master of the studio whose compositions were so complex that they required musicians who could meet his exacting standards. On the other hand, he had to find a way to place his own words naturally into this sumptuous sound.

As he told Chris Willman in a March interview for Variety Magazine, his first thought was: “‘How am I ever gonna make sense with something so, so, so spaced out?’… So this was more of a challenge for me, to make those words really land on the (minimal beats), and have it still make sense and have it still sound like me. It took a bit of puzzling.”

At the same time, the relationship agonies expressed in the songs required Costello to convey a naked, soul-baring emotion he had rarely had to summon to date. Each song, after all, was a character study in which a complex character ranged across betrayal, being cuckolded, feeble self-justification, self-recrimination, hatred and heartbreak.

And here’s the thing: beneath its shimmering orchestral pop surface, replete with tinkling piano, French horn, and muted strings, the lyrics did not deviate in the slightest from the CD’s first note to last. The first song is not titled “In the Darkest Place” for nothing—not with Costello singing, “I'm lost, I have abandoned every hope.”

Costello and Bacharach chose the song that brought them together, “God Give Me Strength,” to close out their CD. But if the protagonist has chosen to reach out past himself, it’s because he has to: he is in such despair that God is his only hope.

Few moments in pop music describe the searing loss of a lover with the outburst that Costello lets loose at the song’s climax:

I might as well wipe her from my memory
Fracture the spell, as she becomes my enemy
Maybe I was washed out like a lip-print on my shirt
See, I'm only human, I want her to hurt.

Marinated in melancholy, Painted From Memory masterfully expressed what Wall Street Journal critic Marc Myers called this past March “the anguish of failed relationships—creating a new breed of saloon song minus the saloon.”

"I Still Have That Other Girl" brought Costello and Bacharach a 1999 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. But it turned out to be the last studio album they put out during Bacharach’s lifetime.

Bacharach died in February, only a few weeks before the release of a 4-CD box set, The Songs of Bacharach and Costello. The set includes a remastered version of Painted From Memory; Taken from Life, a song cycle reflecting the development of Painted from Memory into an abortive Broadway musical that would have been co-produced by Big Bang Theory showrunner Chuck Lorre; a collection of concert performances, mostly piano-and-vocal from Costello and another Bacharach collaborator, Steve Nieve; and other live Costello performances of scattered Bacharach and David songs over the years.

Recently I blogged about another artist—director Martin Scorsese—moving in a direction not expected by longtime fans with his adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. In a similar radical overturning of expectations, Costello, with Bacharach’s plush orchestration in Painted From Memory, could not have more astounded listeners who wanted no part of collaboration with one of the prime purveyors of Sixties MOR music.

Yet Costello, like Scorsese, created what many now regard as a distinct highlight in a career full of them. And Painted From Memory, like The Age of Innocence, continually rewards those who return to it to find new subtleties each time.

Flashback, June 1963: Brian Wilson Takes Studio Helm for Beach Boys

As the eldest of the musical Wilson brothers and co-songwriter of their first original hits, Brian Wilson was already the center of attention for The Beach Boys. 

But in June 1963, the 21-year-old took on even greater importance as he assumed the role of producer, moving the band into some of the most innovative territory in 1960s pop music even as the additional pressure from it all endangered his fragile psyche.

I became interested in this topic because of the brief scenes devoted to Brian’s studio sessions for Pet Sounds and the single “Good Vibrations” in the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy.  

If music employs elements of mathematics, then the story of how Brian solved so many harmonic equations simultaneously—all within the tight space of a 2 1/2-minute pop single—makes him seem like Einstein discovering the formula for relativity while everyone else is merely adding 2 and 2.

Paul Dano’s Brian in Love and Mercy is, initially, remarkably self-assured for someone so young, coaxing skilled studio musicians towards the sounds he hears in his head. He’s not dictatorial or arrogant in his perfectionism, just hyper-focused—until he finally hears what he has in mind, producing the most beatific of smiles.

Brian had only formed the Beach Boys two years earlier, but his mastery of songwriting and recording techniques was advancing rapidly. And he now had learned enough to know what hadn’t been working, and to try to do something about it.

He and the other Beach Boys had been quietly fuming about how hurriedly and cavalierly their initial producer at Capitol Records, Nick Venet, had arranged their first two LPs, Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ USA. As a bass player himself, Brian especially hated the poor bass sound coming out of Capitol’s studio.

Brian’s father, Murry Wilson, pressed Capitol to let Brian be in sole charge of the band’s production from now on. The record company reluctantly agreed.

On June 12, Brian took his engineer and studio right-hand man, Chuck Britz, into Western Recorders studio, where the Beach Boys worked on two of their seminal early hits, “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Surfer Girl.”

Two days later—still a handful of days short of turning 21—Brian turned to L.A.'s Gold Star studio, used by one of his musical heroes, Phil Spector—and, over the next four years, until a devastating nervous breakdown diminished his influence in the band, evolved into one of the most influential forces in pop music.

But more interesting to me ultimately was how Brian came by his musical acumen, what his innovations were, and why—along with Phil Spector, George Martin, and Berry Gordy—he ranks among the most influential musical producers of the Sixties.

To answer the first question: however Brian developed as a musician—the bassist and keyboard player in a rock ‘n’ roll band—was as basic as learning one’s ABCs. Even obvious early influences like Chuck Berry, The Lettermen, the Four Freshmen, and Jan and Dean could only take him so far.

He needed people who could fire his imagination. From the age of four, Brian was taken with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, bowled over by “everything” about it, he told NPR in an interview 13 years ago: “The chords, the melodic movement, the arranging, the impetus, the excitement, the beauty. It was just an absolute work of art."

Among slightly older contemporaries, Brian found a couple of others who provoked him into thinking how he could expand his musical palette.

As a composer and producer, Burt Bacharach was blending the complex chromatic shifts in jazz into three-minute pop melodramas of aching and loss.

The “Wall of Sound” created by Spector particularly affected Brian. He played one of the hits of the super-producer labeled the “first tycoon of teen” by Tom Wolfe, “Be My Baby,” “a hundred times every single day,” according to the lead singer on the single, Ronnie Bennett (who later married Spector). 

In fact, Brian wrote in the following year “Don’t Worry, Baby,” hoping vainly that it would be used by the man he regarded as the greatest producer in the world.

As Brian increasingly used the group of ace studio musicians known as “The Wrecking Crew,” other members of the Beach Boys—notably, Mike Love—began to chafe about where they would fit in with all of this. 

With so little to do instrumentally themselves, how long would they have to wait around in the studio till he got what he wanted? Where would deviating from their surf rock sound take them on the marketplace? How would they perform this in concert? And where would their own harmonies fit in?

On this last score, certainly, their fears proved groundless.  Brian adopted Spector’s method of doubling up on instruments, including ones that were quite unusual in pop music. (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”, on Pet Sounds, featured two pianos, three guitars, three basses, four horns, two accordions, drums, and percussion.)

But, as noted in Scott McCormick's September 2017 post from the blog “Disc Makers,” the Beach Boy leader also exercised restraint and allowed for more aural space, enabling more intimate harmonies—exactly his group’s forte.

A year and a half later, Brian’s crippling workload and frenetic songwriting-arranging-touring schedule led him to have a nervous breakdown while on tour, leading him to stop performing live so he could concentrate on the studio. It was the first indication of the mental health issues that would plague him from then on. 

But, even as he worried about how the Beach Boys would compete musically against a foreign invader on the U.S. charts—the Beatles—Brian would be creating work that would be imitated by fellow musicians and loved by millions of fans for the next 60 years and counting. 

Always musically adventurous, he was evolving the group from its Berry-based guitar foundation and surf-and-hot-rod teen subject matter to polyphonic pop symphonies that would take in a wider age group and world.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bacharach and David, on ‘The Blues They Send to Meet Me’)

“But there's one thing I know:
The blues they send to meet me won't defeat me,
It won't be long 'til happiness
Steps up to greet me.”—"Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head,” lyrics by Hal David, music by Burt Bacharach, first performed by B.J. Thomas on the “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” Soundtrack (1969) 

Remembering American composer, producer, pianist—and Oscar-winner for this gem of a song—Burt Bacharach (1928-2023).

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.)

This Day in Television History (‘ABC Movie of the Week’ Kicks TV Films Into High Gear)

Sept. 23, 1969—Mired in last among the then-three TV networks, ABC, figuring it had little if anything to lose, experimented by going all-in on a new TV format. The ABC Movie of the Week premiered with a 90-minute episode, the first of nearly 270 that would air for the next six years, proving the popularity—and sometimes, the value—of the made-for-television movie.

The plane-crash drama “Seven in Darkness,” which kicked off the series, was not, technically, the “first TV movie.” That honor belonged to “See How They Run,” a John Forsythe that aired in 1964. Through the next five years, however, attempts to expand on that footprint were fitful.

But the young ABC exec Barry Diller pushed hard for running a 90-minute TV movie in the same time slot every week. Each new film would be billed as an event, a “world premiere,” and Diller was careful to promote the series as "the most costly series in network history."

Even so, the decision was not as big a gamble as he suggested. At worst, ABC might win points with critics for its sense of innovation; at best, it could it could go nowhere but up in the ratings. There was not enough product to feed the demand for films on the networks. 

Moreover, in a 1989 Los Angeles Times article on the made-for-TV phenomenon, Grant Tinker—head of NBC’s West Coast programming department in the Sixties, then later the network’s chairman—recalled, “In those days, feature movies were not stopping on cable first, and so they did well (in the ratings),” said Tinker, who later became chairman of NBC and now heads up his own production company, GTG Entertainment. “And these television movies, which we made and cast with theatrical movies in mind, did comparably well.”

Finally, Diller figured out how to produce TV movies more cheaply than some in the industry anticipated. When Universal boss Lew Wasserman said he couldn’t make them for less than $400,000 a picture, Diller got ABC to establish its own production unit and team up with various producers such as Aaron Spelling and David L. Wolper, keeping them on a tight budget throughout.

During its first season, I was, at age 10, still a bit too young to stay up till its closing credits at 10 am. Moreover, several films that season—“Daughter of the Mind,” “Along Came a Spider,” “How Awful About Allan”—looked creepy enough to give me nightmares had I been bold enough to watch.

But even then, I was curious and lured to the show by its beguiling theme, “Nikki,” composed three years earlier by Burt Bacharach for his daughter and arranged by Harry Betts as musical background to the computer-style opening graphics.

From the first, The ABC Movie of the Week succeeded through five means:

*Offering new, often offbeat, roles to stars of Hollywood’s “Golden Era.” “Seven in Darkness” offered a good example, with this innovative form of TV starring “Mr. Television” himself, Milton Berle. The former comedy star won plaudits for a change-of-pace dramatic role as one of seven blind survivors of a plane crash. Similar roles outside their wheelbarrow were accepted by Edward G. Robinson in “The Old Man Who Cried Wolf” and Bing Crosby in “Dr. Cook’s Garden,” while Ray Milland, Walter Brennan, Myrna Loy and Gene Tierney also appeared in the series.

*Creating opportunities for rising talents. Before making an impact on the silver screen in, respectively, The Godfather and Lady Sings the Blues, James Caan and Billy Dee Williams scored as NFL teammates and friends in the tearjerker “Brian’s Song.” And, four years before Jaws, Steven Spielberg demonstrated that he knew how to amp up suspense with “Duel,’ starring Dennis Weaver as a businessman on a road who realizes that a diesel-truck driver is out for his blood.

*Using TV movies to test-run series. Several series got their start as highly rated episodes of the ABC Movie of the Week: “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Night Stalker,” “Kung Fu,” “Wonder Woman” and “Starsky and Hutch.” 

*Offering a variety of genres. From one week to the next, viewers might find a different genre: horror (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), film noir “Goodbye, My Love”), rom-com (“The Feminist and the Fuzz”), or family drama (“Go Ask Alice”).

*Highlighting subject matter still too sensitive to make it to the big screen. Even as the rising youth culture and the decline of the film industry’s longtime censorship codes led to groundbreaking new works on the silver screen, some topics were still too sensitive or even controversial to be dealt with. With so much money on the line, many executives preferred to play it safe. TV had no such constraints because the expenses of a TV movie were lower to begin with. ABC capitalized on this freedom with such fare as “The Ballad of Andy Crocker,” starring Lee Majors as a Vietnam vet experiencing trouble readjusting to civilian life, and “That Certain Summer,” with Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen in a pioneering study of homosexuality.

For several seasons, the ABC Movie of the Week scored well in the ratings and often with critics (notably with “Brian’s Song” and “That Certain Summer”). The bottom finally dropped out in 1975, after the network had set aside yet a second night for TV movies and quality consequently suffered. But by this time, the genre had been well established, with the other networks—as well as the fledgling HBO—also taking to the format. 

I am sure there are many others besides me who remember this series and wish, like me, that the networks could offer something like this again, rather than so many hours of reality TV.

Song Lyric of the Day (Jackie DeShannon, on the Magic ‘When You Walk in the Room’)

“I see a summer's night with a magic moon

Every time that you walk in the room.”—Jackie DeShannon, “When You Walk in the Room” (1964), from her The Best of Jackie DeShannon CD (1991)

There’s some question about a birthdate surrounding this post. Most reference sources that I’ve seen on the Web indicate that singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon was born on this date 70 years ago in Hazel, Kentucky. Other sources push the date back to 1941.

I’m not in any position to clarify the question with Ms. DeShannon. In any case, I have it on good authority—any one of a number of women!—that a gentleman never asks a lady her age. So, let’s accept the younger age, shall we? After all, the best of her songs make us feel young and filled with the joy of hearing a bit of music in a new way.

Some of her best-known songs were actually written by others (Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono’s “Needles and Pins”). On the other hand, she wrote a monster hit for someone else (Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”), so it all works out in the end.

One of the most charming accounts of her early career came in this 2010 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, recorded at the time of DeShannon’s induction into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. There’s a great deal here about the politics and personalities of the music industry back in the Sixties (including the Beatles, for whom she opened on their first American tour). But I also got a kick out of her explanation for the story behind my favorite song of hers, “When You Walk in the Room”:

“I was waiting for a date to pick me up — who shall remain nameless and has for these many, many years. He doesn't even know that he's the one that I wrote it about. And he was late. And the guitar was sitting there, and I was very excited about the dinner date, and that's how it happened. And I just wrote it pretty fast, actually."

(Check out this YouTube video of her live performance of this classic two years ago. Nearly a half century after she first sang it, her voice remains in remarkably good form.)

Her own songs have been covered by countless artists, and as one of the first, most successful pop female singer-songwriters, she became a true pioneer in the entertainment industry. But one of the artists she influenced is rather unexpected: Bruce Springsteen.

Forty years ago, when he was starting out in the business, The Boss made a pilgrimage with buddy "Miami Steve" Van Zandt to the home of Ms. DeShannon, who played them tapes of unreleased songs she had composed with Van Morrison. A few years later, at his crucial Bottom Line gigs in August 1975, Springsteen performed a version of “When You Walk in the Room” that was every bit the equal of DeShannon’s original (not to mention the one that became a hit for the British group, The Searchers).

The Boss, obviously, knew a great song when he heard one. So does Ms. DeShannon: In her own 2001 Bottom Line appearance, she returned the favor to her long-ago admirer by playing a cover of Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” as the final song of her well-received set.

Song Lyric of the Day (Jimmy Webb, on Bitter Wine and Wasted Lives)

“That precious wine you're tasting will be bitter when you're done

It's your life you're wasting

Don't you think it's sad you had to start so young?” —“This Is Your Life,” music and lyrics by Jimmy Webb (1969)

Shortly after seeing the excellent concert at the Bergen Performing Arts Center by Jimmy Webb (with headiner Judy Collins) (see my review from a few weeks ago), I glanced over the bio on his Web site. Though many of the songs listed there were ones I was familiar with (“MacArthur Park,” “Up, Up and Away,” “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston”), one in particular caught my eye: “This Is Your Life.” I wondered why I had never heard of it, particularly since it wasn’t performed by some obscure group but by the Fifth Dimension, at their hit-making height in the late Sixties. What it was like?

Through Spotify and YouTube, I was able to find out. In the four-decade discography of Webb, this tune ranks among the most unusual, with no striking image either to grab listeners by the lapels or leave them bewildered (“someone left the cake out in the rain,” from “MacArthur Park”). “This Is Your Life,” ostensibly about someone else—the person the narrator loves—feels like one of the most introspective of Webb’s great pop songs. It’s a no-looking-away summing-up, an urgent appeal to start a new life now. It’s not a bad way to end a year—tallying the costs, and rededicating one’s self to a better life.

As far as I can tell, the first artist to cover Webb’s song was Thelma Houston (“the most prodigious talent I have ever encountered,” according to the songwriter), on her debut LP, Sunshower. It didn’t provide her with the massive hit she would have several years later in the disco era, “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” Nor did it become one for the other artists, in addition to the Fifth Dimension, who recorded it: The Revells, Norman Connors (featuring Eleanor Mills), and Billy Paul.

Webb has spoken of the importance of a good title to a song, and he’s sometimes borrowed one out in the popular culture if it fits the mood of his tune, such as sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. (Titles cannot be copyrighted, which is why you have Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jackson Browne.) Growing up in the Fifties, Webb would have been extremely familiar with a TV documentary series called This Is Your Life, in which host Ralph Edwards surprised a guest, taking him or her through memorable moments of their lives in front of a live audience.

The title may have lingered in the songwriter’s mind, but this song is an ironic inversion of the frequently sentimental TV show. It speaks of a character who’s a “runaround,/ The worst one in our end of town.” He is throwing his life away, “the only one you’ve got.”

In lush, orchestral pop music, one song comes the closest to the spirit of “This Is Your Life”: Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Alfie.” The same theme underlies each song: the meaning of a life, i.e., “What’s it all about?”

“This Is Your Life” offers no reason why the narrator loves the one being addressed.  In fact, it springs to life the most when it is angriest. I’ve come to think that it’s not simply written in the second person, but in a form that might be called “the accusatory you”—i.e., to one’s self.  If you want a sense of what it sounds like, turn to a novel written, remarkably, entirely in this form: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City.

The line about “that precious wine you're tasting will be bitter when you're done” hit me with special force because, in his BergenPAC concert, Webb mentioned that he had been 11 years sober since the last Thanksgiving. Webb was young when he wrote this song, only 23, but he was already running with a fast crowd in the entertainment community at the time. (Who on earth could keep up with his “MacArthur Park” interpreter, Richard Harris, in those years?) The title of a semi-autobiographical Broadway musical he was unsuccessfully attempting to launch speaks volumes about his state of mind around this time:  His Own Dark City.

Long before the carousel stops, many addicts sense that the riotous living has to stop—and wonder about the emptiness that their craving can’t assuage—but they are powerless to make a change then. “This Is Your Life” strikes me as one of these moments of quick but blinding self-realization—a thought reinforced by seeing how the song worked in its original context on the Thelma Houston album (which Webb produced for Dunhill Records, and for which he wrote all but one song). According to a perceptive piece by Matthew Weiner for Stylus Magazine, it formed part of a mini-suite on her LP along with the similarly introspective songs “Pocketful of Keys” and “This Is Where I Came In.”

After listening to four versions of the song, I agree with a blog post by music and entertainment writer Rashod Ollison of the Virginian-Pilot that “no one has pierced the lyric” the way that the version by Billy Paul (most famous, of course, for “Me and Mrs. Jones”) does. It’s a passionate outcry, in the same searing sense that anger directed against one’s self, in the deepest recesses of the heart, can be. It contains all the pained knowledge packed into the final line of McInerney's novel about a young, substance-abusing "runaround": "You will have to learn everything all over again."

 

(Photo shows Jimmy Webb performing live at The Bottom Line in New York City, August 24, 2003.)