Burt Bacharach has never been a political kind of guy. He freely admits that Vietnam seemed too far away to care about and that, while he wasn’t a big fan of Nixon, he never voted.
“Were they real upheavals in my life? No,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I just kept writing love songs, you know? (Valium) ”
But after decades of writing love songs and pop standards, Austin Powers’ favorite singer has released At This Time, the first political album of his career. With cameo collaborations from the unlikely trio of Rufus Wainwright, Elvis Costello and Dr. Dre, the results are more interesting for the personalities involved than for the alternately bland and bizarre music itself.
At This Time blends Bacharach’s signature lounge-pop piano and smooth crooning with the slick production and rhythms of modern R&B, thanks to Dre’s drum loops. The lyrics, which are the first Bacharach has ever written, toss off vague, occasionally ham-handed shots at President Bush’s foreign policy.
“I’m very not so knowledgable,” he humbly admitted. “If I went on Bill O’Reilly he’d make mincemeat of me.” He remains steadfast in his newfound convictions, though.
“I was a guy that never got tuned in, and I started to tune in,” he said. “You can’t go in and make our democracy in places where it’s not supposed to work. That sounds like I’m stepping over my head, and maybe I am, but it’s a feeling I’ve got. Rather than talk about things like that, I say it through my music.”
The man who wrote “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “What the World Needs Now is Love” doesn’t seem quite as comfortable with his new subject matter, but his ear for melody remains intact, if only that. The combination of traditionalist pop and contemporary urban, faux-soul groove is ear-catchingly unusual at first, but it fails to hold up over the album’s increasingly repetitive 10 tracks. As interesting as a Bacharach-Dre collaboration sounds on paper, it doesn’t play out as well in the studio.
Costello made an album with Bacharach five years ago, and Wainwright is only one of a rash of young artists making Bacharach’s influence hip again. Both seem like more logical guest choices than stoner hip-hop legend Dre, but Bacharach claims the meeting was destined to happen.
“Dre was going to make his last album, which would be his last solo album, and he was looking for what to do musically,” he said. “He wanted to meet me, I wanted to meet him.” When he took some of Dre’s drum tracks into his garage studio and fleshed them out, the results struck a chord.
“He wasn’t even close to being ready to start that album; he had Eminem to cut, 50 Cent,” Bacharach said. “He listened, and thought that the track that turned out to be ‘Go Ask Shakespeare’ could be a hit.” Both maestros of their respective mediums may be showing their age in what they consider hit material, but their modern tastes and sensibilities run surprisingly close.
“I like Alicia Keyes, I think she’s pretty damn great,” Bacharach said. “Another track I like is Outkast, ‘I Like the Way You Move.’ I mean, what a killer, you know? And I like the Black Eyed Peas.”
Politics take precedence over bangin’ beats on At This Time, though, and Bacharach isn’t shy about taking a stand.
“At this point in my life, I feel that I’m not afraid of any consequences,” he said. “You cancel a date on me, you cancel a date on me; I’m more concerned about losing the base of my heart.”
