Sach O never joined the Psychic Friends Network.
Paper Mache
Dionne Warwick built her career by flipping the conventions of easy listening and infusing them with soul and passion but it’s still shocking to hear her weary, resigned kiss-off to the 60’s consumer culture she was supposed to embody. While the hippies were raging from the outside, Dionne takes an insider’s look at modern culture’s failure to offer anything of substance to the people whose lives it was supposed to enrich. Years after punk dulled our ears to the electric guitar, it’s still shocking to hear this kind of stuff over xylophones and accordions.
Wives and Lovers
Opening with off-kilter ¾ jazz drumming, “Wives and Lovers” is Dionne getting to play bad girl, threatening a housewife that she’ll steal her man right from under her. On one hand, the whole thing feels like a period piece to modern ears but on the other, just how many R&B singers are singing about the exact same thing with a few extra slang words in 2009?
Check Out Time
A close cousin of Jimmy Webb’s “By the time I get to Phoenix”, “Check out Time” flips the script by having a female protagonist leave her fiancé and the comfortable-yet-suffocating life surrounding him for freedom and the unknown. The opening lines are a fantastic exercise in contrast: she’s stretched out in bed miles from home…but it’s in some old motel without a plan on where to go from there. By the song’s end, she’s gathered her resolve, checked out and is off on her way via extended piano outro. Stunning.
Walk on By
OK, NOTHING will surpass Isaac Hayes’ 12-minute psychedelic reconstruction, period. BUT, Warwick’s breezy original provides Hayes with a great foundation to work with. For hip-nop and soul fans accustomed to hearing the song slow-and-low with a bluesy baritone, Dionne’s high notes and the track’s relatively brisk tempo make for the perfect flip. And that dramatic string breakdown in the middle? Yeah, it might have given Mr. Hot Buttered Soul an idea or two as well.
I’ll Never Fall in Love Again
This is sort of like writing about Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” or Michael Jackson’s “Beat it”. “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” is a standard so overplayed that it should have lost its power years before Elvis Costello brought it back for Austin Powers II. That it still retains its power is a tribute to the universality of its message: love sucks, but hey…
Walking Backwards down the Road
This isn’t Warwick’s best song, her most epic or her most famous, but it may well be her quirkiest. An understated, shuffling pop number that combines exotica, strings, horns and a banjo, Dionne sings the song’s titular chorus in a half-hearted tone, nonchalantly abandoning her lover to his new girl. The instrumentation, the reserve and the slightly surreal quality would directly or indirectly inspire thousands of pop kids to make weird, pretty music expressing complicated human qualities.
