GOD GIVE ME STRENGTH - Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello
(Burt Bacharach/Elvis Costello)
Liner notes from The Look Of Love: The Burt Bacharach Collection

Arranged by BURT BACHARACH
Produced by BURT BACHARACH & ELVIS COSTELLO

From the original motion picture soundtrack album Grace Of My Heart, MCA
#15102 (9/96)

  Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager continued to write and produce
successful, synth-driven, adult contemporary/MOR music throughout the rest of
the '80s...all the way up till 1991, when their professional and personal
relationship came to an end.
  "I think we just burnt out," says Carole. "I have great respect for Burt
as a composer, and I have gratitude for the work we did together. I think it
was good work, and important. And life goes on."
  Bacharach remarried in the early '90s and has two children with his
current wife; he kept busy with live performances, including a wonderful live
show he put together with Dionne Warwick; and he wrote with other lyricists,
including John Bettis, B.A. Robertson, and even Hal David (on "Sunny Weather
Lover," a Dionne track from 1993). But a strange thing began to happen --
something that may have started happening back in 1978, when Elvis Costello
startled punk-rock audiences with his cover of "I Just Don't Know What To Do
With Myself." The songs of Burt Bacharach, which many had dismissed as
"elevator music," began to be revisited, relistened to...and revered. The
"Space-Age Bachelor Pad" music fad may have fueled the flames, but an
increasing number of young people are reclaiming the genuinely timeless,
sophisticated, and miraculous music of Burt Bacharach as their own. Not as
kitsch -- but as classic American 20th century pop. "I think he could be
spoken about in the same breath as Richard Rodgers," Elvis Costello told the
Irish Times. "I think he's that good."
  In 1995 director Allison Anders asked Burt and Elvis if they would write a
song together for her upcoming film, Grace Of My Heart, about a Carole King-
like singer/songwriter who was trying to make her way through the music-biz
world of '60s pop. Anders, along with her musical director, Larry Klein,
wanted to partner writers from the Brill Building era with present-day artists
they had influenced -- thus the Bacharach/Costello pairing.
  Anders told Vanity Fair that she needed a ballad "of the kind that Burt
would've written for Dusty Springfield, but it has to reflect the loss that
the main character had just had, a disastrous love affair." But the song was
needed quickly, and Burt was in California -- and Elvis in Dublin, Ireland.
"We never met; we just did it all on the phone," says Burt. "We did it on
answering machines; we sent tapes. He'd record something on my answering
machine, I'd take it off, write the lead sheets, send it back to him."
  The song that emerged from the transatlantic writing sessions was "God
Give Me Strength." "I wrote my share of the music," Elvis told Musician
magazine, "but when it really takes off, particularly in the main bridge, he
moves into another gear than I know how to achieve. The payoff is that sense
of darkness which is in his music and is quite compatible with my own feeling.
There's that romantic doubt in some of his sunniest songs, which makes his
music so enduring."
  The track was recorded at the Record Plant in L.A. "It was in that 6/8,
12/8 thing I used to write in, that I hadn't done in years," Burt told Vanity
Fair. "Musically, I can't go back and say, I want to write something like
'Don't Make Me Over.' I just don't think that way. But this was for a movie
about the Brill Building, so I thought, Great!"
  "God Give Me Strength" is an astonishing, powerful, important song,
already a Bacharach classic of the highest order. The experience proved so
satisfying for both Burt and Elvis that they decided to write and produce an
entire album together. Released in the fall of 1998, Painted From Memory
finds Burt reaching a new generation of fans with ambitious, uncompromising
music. Carole Bayer Sager thinks that this new material reveals Bacharach's
past -- and future. "It sounds like he's gone a little more back to the Burt
melodies of the '60s," she says, "which may be the real core essence of how he
writes."
  And sometimes endings can be like beginnings, and sometimes the world is a
circle. "I'm a person that always tries to deal with melody," Bacharach says,
"a melodist. Is there such a word, a melodist?"
  For you, Burt? Yes.

(by Alec Cumming, w/ assistance from Paul Grein)