"Anyone Who Had A Heart" was written by the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It has some unusual time signatures, which wasn't unusual for a Bacharach composition (he wrote the music, David the lyrics). He loved working with Dionne Warwick because she could sing these complex arrangements and reacted to them with excitement, not fear.
The song came together when Bacharach, David and Warwick were working up songs in Bacharach's apartment. He came up with the music, David wrote a partial lyric, and they played it for Dionne. "What are you waiting for? Go finish it off!" she said, so David finished the lyric. Bacharach spent a week rehearsing the song with Warwick before they recorded it, so when they entered the studio, they were ready.
The song is a real heartbreaker, with Dionne Warwick playing the role of a woman who has been hurt so bad in love, she can't believe the guy has a heart. Because if he did, he would return her affections.
Burt Bacharach and Hal David often infused a great deal of pathos into their songs, including Dionne Warwick's "
Walk On By" and "
Don't Make Me Over." "
Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa," which they wrote for Gene Pitney, is another example.
The British writer Maureen Cleave called these "neurotic ballads."
Dionne Warwick's first single, "Don't Make Me Over," was released in 1962 and rose to #21. Her next two singles, also Bacharach/David compositions, were "Make The Music Play" and "This Empty Place." They were just minor hits, but "Anyone Who Had A Heart" did a lot better, rising to #8. The next single, "Walk On By" (recorded at the same session), did even better, going to #6.
Warwick, who entered the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2024, had several more big hits, including "
(Theme from) Valley of the Dolls" and "
I Say a Little Prayer."
In the UK, Dionne Warwick's original battled Cilla Black's cover on the chart, and Black's won decisively, going to #1 while Warwick's only went to #42.
Black's version was produced by George Martin, famous for his work with The Beatles. Apparently, Beatle's manager Brian Epstein bought a copy of the original when he was in New York and brought it back to London, where he gave it to Martin.
Warwick wasn't happy when Black's version became the hit, noting that it was a note-for-note copy.
Burt Bacharach explained the shifting time signatures to Record Collector magazine: "It's very rich, it's very emotional. It's soft, it's loud, it's explosive. It changes time signature constantly, 4/4 to 5/4, and 7/8 bar at the end of the song on the turnaround. It wasn't intentional, it was all just natural. That's the way I felt it."
In the UK,
Cilla Black's cover, which sold over 900,000 copies, became the first UK #1 by a solo female artist since Helen Shapiro's "Walking Back To Happiness" in 1961. A former hatcheck girl at the Cavern Club in Liverpool where the Beatles used to play in the early '60s, Cilla Black went on to become the most successful female singer of the Mersey boom, with 11 UK Top 10 hits in total. Later she became a leading TV presenter, hosting shows such as
Blind Date and
Surprise Surprise.
Artists to cover this song include Dusty Springfield, Shirley Bassey and Linda Ronstadt.
Kenny Vance and The Planotones recorded this for their 2007 album
Countdown To Love. Vance, who was an original member of Jay & the Americans,
says of the song: "I kind of did it like you're sitting in your living room just telling somebody, that's how I interpreted that."
Pay attention to the background vocals on this one. According to Burt Bacharach, he had three Black singers - Cissy Houston, Myrna Smith and Dionne's sister Dee Dee Warwick - singing in the lower register, and three white singers, including Linda November, singing on top of them. "If you listen to the record, you can hear the soul on the bottom and the altitude coming from the white girls," he wrote.
Burt Bacharach named his memoir Anyone Who Had A Heart. In it Hal David explains that Bacharach's music for the song posed a lyrical conundrum. In the line "And know I dream of you," he wanted the accent on "you" but had to put it on "of" because of the music. He tried to fix it right up until the recording session but had to let it go.
