Original Recording
"Anyone Who Had a Heart" was presented to Dionne Warwick in unfinished form while she, Burt Bacharach and Hal David were rehearsing in Bacharach's Manhattan apartment for an upcoming recording session. Bacharach had finished the score which, in his words, "changes time signature constantly, 4/4 to 5/4, and a 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." This was the first use of polyrhythm in popular music. However, David had written only about a third of the lyric and was reluctant to finalize the sixth line of the first stanza as "And know I dream of you", feeling the stress was unnatural (as opposed to "And know I dream of you"). Bacharach played a snippet of the tune for Warwick, who was enraptured and at her urging David left Warwick to rehearse with Bacharach in the living room while he (David) retired to a bedroom where he completed the lyric. Of the unnatural stress in "I dream of you", David later stated: "I tried to find a way to make the you do something and I could never do it... had to let it go."
Warwick recorded "Anyone Who Had a Heart" at Bell Sound Studios in Manhattan in November 1963, in a session produced by Bacharach which also yielded "Walk On By" and "In the Land of Make Believe". According to published reports, Warwick nailed the tune in only one take – though an alternate remix of the take appears on a compilation album released in 1976 by Springboard International.
Released on the Scepter label in November 1963, "Anyone Who Had a Heart" broke in Detroit, where it reached #1 that December. The track became Warwick's first Top Ten single in January 1964, peaking at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Cash Box Pop 100 that February, also reaching #6 on the Cash Box R&B chart. The track was also a hit in Canada, reaching #11 on the hit parade for Toronto radio station CHUM, the country's most influential rock music broadcaster (national charts for Canada were not published during the chart run of "Anyone Who Had a Heart").
Read more about this topic: Anyone Who Had A Heart (song)
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