Ididn’t know it then, but we used to listen to Burt Bacharach songs in the car. The cassette tape that my dad loaded up for long summer holiday drives was a mix he’d made for my mum. There were all kinds of sentimental, cross-era songs on there, but most of all I remember the beauty of the many voices that sung almost exclusively of heartbreak: the seismic strings of Dusty Springfield’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”; the child-like simplicity of the Carpenters’ “(They Long to Be) Close to You”; a voice I later learned to be Dionne Warwick leading the jazz-inflected “Walk on By” and the bright but mournful “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”.
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