Upon hearing of Burt Bacharach’s death last week at age 93, and then immersing myself in his many dozens of songs recorded by numerous artists, I was overcome by an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia.

I often get nostalgic when I look through old photo albums, watch old movies or, most notably, hear music from my childhood. Music from the 1960s, when I was between ages five and fifteen, can really trigger vivid memories and warm remembrances.

I can’t truthfully say I was an enormous fan of Bacharach and the songs he created with longtime lyrics-writing partner Hal David. They seemed pleasant enough, but they seemed decidedly unhip to me. Songs like “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” or “Make It Easy On Yourself” may have been easy on the ears, but that’s because they were undeniably part of the “easy listening” genre my parents enjoyed. I was a Beatles devotée, and early rock and roll, and Motown, and electric blues. Bacharach’s music was pretty far removed from those musical styles.

So it was very interesting for me to discover how nostalgic I felt when I assembled the Spotify playlist you’ll find at the end of this essay. Song after song after song transported me to a simpler time when my hours were filled with riding bikes, playing catch, watching mindless TV shows or playing with HO racing cars.

Take Dionne Warwick’s treatment of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” a US Top Ten hit in the spring of 1968. Listening to it again this past week made me realize how deceptively simple it is when, in fact, it’s quite a sophisticated piece of pop music. Bacharach used unpredictable chord progressions, syncopated rhythm patterns and irregular phrasing, influenced by jazz harmonics, while David’s lyrics told a marvelously poignant tale of a guy who moves to L.A. to become a big singer, finds no luck and must return home to San Jose. Anyone who has ever had to give up on a dream can relate.

In the many obituaries and tributes published in the past week, the Bacharach-David song that has been referenced most often is “What the World Needs Now is Love,” made famous in 1965 by Jackie DeShannon. It starts off kind of corny but settles into a dramatic melody with moving lyrics that have stood the test of time and are just as relevant in today’s divisive world as they were nearly 60 years ago when Vietnam, civil rights and assassinations were tearing the country apart.

And then there’s “I Say a Little Prayer,” which reached the Top Ten twice in versions by Warwick in 1967 and Aretha Franklin in 1968. David said he wrote the words from the perspective of a woman at home worrying about her soldier boyfriend in Vietnam, but he wanted to keep the lyrics more general to avoid any controversy.

These songs and many other Bacharach compositions are, without a doubt, “earworms” — irresistible little tunes that, once in your head, seem to be permanently lodged there. I found myself singing/humming “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me” and “Alfie” all damn day…and I didn’t mind in the least. I marinated in them.

My research into the Bacharach-David catalog revealed a number of things I hadn’t known:

I didn’t know they wrote “Baby It’s You,” the 1962 hit by The Shirelles that was covered by The Beatles on their debut LP.

It was news to me that they wrote “One Less Bell to Answer,” the #2 hit by The 5th Dimension in 1970.

Were you aware they wrote the title song to the 1965 Woody Allen film “What’s New Pussycat?” by Tom Jones? I wasn’t.

They wrote two hits that qualify as quasi-western, both for Gene Pitney — “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” in 1962 and “24 Hours From Tulsa” in 1963.

Written by Bacharach-David and first recorded in 1963, “(They Long to Be) Close to You” became the breakthrough #1 hit that launched the careers of Karen & Richard Carpenter in 1970.

Bacharach helped co-write “Heartlight,” Neil Diamond’s last Top Ten hit, with Diamond and Carole Bayer Sager in 1982.

Between 1962 and 1970, the names of Bacharach and David appeared on the US Top 40 nearly as often as Lennon and McCartney.

Bacharach was nominated FIVE Times for the Best Song Oscar, winning twice, for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Arthur’s Theme” from the 1981 comedy “Arthur.”

Bacharach’s music was recorded by many top artists of the era and more recent decades as well. You can hear loads of diverse covers of Bacharach songs by the likes of James Taylor, The Chambers Brothers, Patti Labelle, Naked Eyes, Tony Bennett, Idina Menzel, Christopher Cross, Cilla Black, Seal, Herb Alpert, Bobbie Gentry, Michael McDonald, Stan Getz, The White Stripes, Rod Stewart, B.J. Thomas, James Brown, Paul Carrack, Jeffrey Osborne, Diana Krall, Bobby Vinton, Greg Kihn, Stevie Wonder, Cher and Elvis Costello, among many others.

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Born in 1928 in Kansas City, Bacharach grew up in Queens, where he learned cello, drums and piano at the encouragement of his mother, an amateur singer and pianist. While still a teen, Bacharach often sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs to hear Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who proved influential to his later musical stylings.

While serving in the Army, he met singer Vic Damone and ended up spending three years as a pianist and conductor for him.  Said Damone in 1997, “Burt was clearly bound to go out on his own.  He was an exceptionally talented, classically trained pianist, with very clear ideas on the musicality of songs, how they should be played, and what they should sound like.  I appreciated his musical gifts.”  Bacharach later served for five years as arranger, conductor and music director for the legendary Marlene Dietrich, accompanying her on tours until he decided he wanted to concentrate on songwriting.

He met Hal David at the famous Brill Building, the Manhattan songwriting hub where teams like Carole King and Gerry Goffin churned out hits for the teenage market, but Bacharach and David wrote more sophisticated stuff in the Cole Porter vein.  By the early ’60s, they had scored hits for Marty Robbins (“The Story of My Life”) and Perry Como (“Magic Moments”).  In 1963, singer Jerry Butler asked Bacharach to produce the session for his song “Make It Easy On Yourself,” and with that, his career as a producer was off and running.

In his obituary in The New York Times last week, writer Stephen Holden succinctly captured Bacharach’s niche:  “He was a pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism.  Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs he wrote (with David) during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.”

Bacharach seemed to be the epitome of sophisticated cool when he was paired to his vivacious second wife, actress Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965-1981. They were among Hollywood’s elite couples as both enjoyed star turns on the charts and on television.

The Bacharach-David team’s uncanny good fortune seemed to run out when they signed on to write the songs for the 1973 musical version of the classic film “Lost Horizon,” an unmitigated disaster with critics and at the box office. Bacharach let his ego get the better of him, blaming David for not supporting his attempts to wrest control from the film’s music people, effectively ending their partnership virtually overnight. He compounded his problems by reneging on a promised to produce Warwick’s next solo project, which caused estrangement between him and the most successful interpreter of his songs.

“Look, there’s no point in going over all the gory details,” Bacharach said in 1993, as he recalled the estrangement period. “It’s all behind us now. If I had to do it over again, I never, never would do it the same way.”  It took more than ten years, but they ended up mending their differences in 1986 when they combined forces on the hugely popular hit “That’s What Friends Are For,” Warwick’s collaborative effort with Gladys Knight, Elton John and Stevie Wonder that reached #1 and won multiple Grammy awards.

In a 1995 interview, Bacharach offered his thoughts on his songwriting process. “I didn’t want to make the songs the same way as they’d been done, so I’d split vocals and instrumentals and try to make it interesting. For me, it’s about the peaks and valleys of where a record can take you. You can tell a story and be able to be explosive one minute, then get quiet as kind of a satisfying resolution… It may be easy on the ears, but it’s anything but easy. The precise arrangements, the on-a-dime shifts in meter, and the mouthfuls of lyrics required to service all those notes have, over the years, proven challenging to singers and musicians.”

Bacharach added, “As a songwriter, I’ve been luckier than most. Many composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like. People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television. Because I’ve also been a performer, I got to make a direct connection with people, and I’ve been very grateful about that.”

In 1997, he had enough self-deprecating humor to appear as himself singing “What the World Needs Now is Love” in the hit comedy “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” spoofing the ’60s James Bond cool vibe.

Rest in peace, Burt Bacharach. The world still needs “love sweet love” and will continue to sing along to your songs like the lovable, nostalgic earworms they are.

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It was a challenge trying to decide which versions of Burt Bacharach’s classic songs to include on this playlist. In some cases, I’ve include two or even three different renditions to show the range of styles and arrangements out there.

For a guy like me who has always held a special place in my heart for David Crosby and the marvelous music he has made, it has been most gratifying to see the abundance of heartfelt tributes paid to him in traditional and social media in the days and weeks since his death on January 18th at age 81.

Let’s face facts. “Croz,” as he was known to his closest associates, could be a prickly guy, full of challenging opinions and harsh words for friends and foes alike, so it’s not hard to imagine that some of them, when told of his passing, might have privately thought “good riddance.”

And there’s no denying that, thanks to a harrowing descent into full-blown drug addiction in the ’70s and ’80s that culminated in convictions and jail time, he became something of a poster boy for the risks of excessive behavior.

But I’m willing to overlook all of that, because David Crosby has written, sung and played on some of my very favorite songs of the past 60 years — songs that have comforted me, exhilarated me and generally accompanied me on life’s ups and downs, and I’m eternally grateful to him for it.

He was a study in contradiction. He wrote gentle, ethereal music, but he was cantankerous and blunt. He was an extraordinary singer and arranger of layered harmonies, but he was inexorably drawn to hard drugs that put him in prison and almost killed him in the 1980s. He was outspoken and defiant about social issues but also wrote serene, mystical lyrics about love and karma. He was a fun-loving guy with a twinkle in his eye, but he was notoriously difficult to work with. As his longtime musical compatriot Stephen Stills put it, “He was both a genius and an asshole.”

As far as I’m concerned, Crosby earned his place in the annals of rock music based on his contributions to two titanic albums: “Crosby, Stills and Nash” (1969) and CSNY’s “Deja Vu” (1970). The lovely “Guinnevere,” the haunting “Long Time Gone,” the apocalyptic “Wooden Ships,” the angry “Almost Cut My Hair” and the magical “Deja Vu” have been hugely influential and impactful in my own musical development, and I never tire of hearing them.

There are so many others — tracks he recorded as a member of The Byrds, on seven solo albums, on a handful of duo LPs with Graham Nash, and on reunion albums with CSN and CSNY. Taken as a whole, which I invite you to do with my Crosby playlist on Spotify at the end of this essay, Crosby’s recorded legacy ranks right up there with the best of the singer-songwriters who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s and beyond.

He has been rightfully praised as one of the very best harmony singers and vocal arrangers in rock music history. He had an uncanny ability to move between the harmonic lines of his various singing partners, crafting unusually creative vocal parts that added uncommon warmth and depth to the songs to which he contributed. As an amateur singer myself, I love to sing along to the harmony parts of great old songs, but if I try to find and stick to Crosby’s parts on the CSN numbers, I fail every time. They’re so densely layered and almost hidden in the mix.

Crosby’s own compositions were typically not very commercial, and consequently, they weren’t heard on Top 40 radio. But on the FM stations, his dreamily eccentric melodies and chord changes were just what the doctor ordered. Take his fascinating debut solo LP, 1971’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” an eclectic batch of introspective tunes (“Traction in the Rain,” “Laughing,” “Song With No Words”) marked by start-and-stop rhythms, shimmering acoustic guitars and his crystal-clear voice.

British musician Robyn Hitchcock said, “Crosby let jazz, folk and rock’n’roll flow into each other, like a child playing with cups of water by a sink. There was a liquid quality to his songs and music.”

His lyrics could be dense or sharply defined. There’s an eight-minute track on the above LP called “Cowboy Movie” that told the tale of a group of Old West outlaws torn apart by a beautiful woman. In actuality, Crosby was singing about Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and how singer Rita Coolidge played a pivotal role in the quartet’s initial breakup because both Stills and Nash had strong feelings for her.

Crosby was a rebel almost from the very beginning. Soon after partnering with Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark to form The Byrds in Los Angeles in 1964, Crosby made it known that he didn’t want to spend his career reimagining the songs of Bob Dylan and others, despite the fact that the group had spectacular success doing exactly that. While he enjoyed coming up with and providing the harmonies that made “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “My Back Pages” so popular, he kept pushing the group to record their own songs. Tentative at first, Crosby grew bolder with enigmatic material like “Everybody’s Been Burned,” “Eight Miles High” and, tellingly, a song about a ménage à trois called “Triad” that the band refused to record. His stubborn individualism ended up getting him fired from The Byrds, but it merely fed his need to further explore and experiment.

He happened upon a then-unknown Joni Mitchell in a Florida coffee bar, took her to L.A. and supervised production of her debut LP. Around the same time, he met Stills and developed a simpatico musical relationship with him, and when Mama Cass Elliott brought Nash into their sphere and they discovered the indelible three-part harmonies they were capable of producing, the trio found themselves in the vanguard of the “back to the garden” movement that served as a counterpoint to the psychedelic experimentation going on concurrently.

The threesome beefed up their on-stage sound with the addition of Neil Young, but things almost immediately went south for Crosby when his girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car accident just as sessions for “Deja Vu” were getting underway. “David went to identify her body, and he’s never been the same since,” Nash famously said. Crosby himself added years later, “When I started out doing drugs, it was marijuana and psychedelics, and it was a lot of fun. We believed we were expanding our consciousness. But then the drugs became more for blurring pain, and you don’t realize you’re getting as strung out as you are.”

And yet, Crosby was an avid performer throughout the ’70s, mostly with just Nash and a backing band, contributing fine original songs like “Carry Me,” “Page 43,” “Low Down Payment,” “Wind on the Water” and “Shadow Captain.” As Stills put it in the wake of “CSN,” their marvelous 1977 reunion album, “His voice was the glue that held us together. He was a giant of a musician, and I will miss him beyond measure.”

By the early ’80s, his addiction to heroin and freebase cocaine proved stronger than his love for making music, and he withdrew deeper into his problems, ultimately bottoming out in a Texas prison in 1986. Miraculously, he rebounded from that difficult time with his singing voice intact, and he returned to the road and the studio with his musical companions as they resumed their place as a reliable concert draw, offering classics and new compositions alike into the ’90s and 2000s.

Robyn Hitchcock said he marveled at Crosby’s longevity. “Because David did such a great job pulling himself out of the narcotic vortex in the late 1980s, it seemed like he’d be around forever,” he said. “It’s disturbing that he’s gone, almost as much as it’s sad. People like Crosby were built to endure, the way their love of music does, so even 81 seems too soon for him to be called away.”

In documentaries and a couple of autobiographical books, Crosby was as candid as we’ve come to expect from him. When asked if he had any regrets, he said, “Sure I do. I regret all the time I wasted being smashed. More recently, I’ve alienated nearly everyone I know. All the guys I’ve made music with won’t talk to me now. I don’t quite know how to undo the things I’ve said and done.”

Despite his unfortunate tendency to say things he later regretted, he somehow managed to collaborate with many dozens of artists over the years, participating in recording sessions or special live performances with a virtual Who’s Who of rock-era musicians. In addition to Stills, Nash and Young, his voice can be heard on records with James Taylor, Paul Kantner, Jerry Garcia, Phil Collins, Lucinda Williams, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Dave Mason, Art Garfunkel, Dan Fogelberg, Bonnie Raitt, David Gilmour, John Mayer, Marc Cohn, Donald Fagen, Shawn Colvin, Michael McDonald, Joe Walsh, Elton John and Carole King.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, Crosby established a productive musical partnership with his long-lost son, James Raymond, and between 2014 and 2022, he released five albums of quality new material, and presented it in concert. I had the good fortune of seeing him perform at LA’s fabled Troubadour in 2014 as he was promoting “Croz,” the first of these recent releases, and found him to be in fine form indeed.

As he aged, Crosby wrote more often about his mortality and the need to make good use of the time he had left. He told Howard Stern in 2021, “I’m at the end of my life, and it’s a very strange thing. Here’s what I’ve come to realize: It’s not how much time you’ve got, because we really don’t know. I could have two weeks, I could have ten years. It’s about what you do with the time that you do have. People get old and die, and that’s how it works. But in the meantime, I’m going to have myself a bunch of fun. I’m going to make some more music.”

He added in a 2022 interview, “I’m too old to perform live anymore. I don’t have the stamina or the strength. But I’ve been making records at a startling rate lately. I’m trying really hard to crank out as much music as I possibly can.”

Consider these lyrics from “I Won’t Stay For Long,” from his final LP: “I’m facing a squall line of a thousand-year storm, /I don’t know if I’m dying or about to be born, /But I’d like to be with you today, /Yes, I’d like to be with you today, /And I won’t stay for long, /I’ve got a place of my own, a little slice, There’s a sliver of air between the water and the ice, /It’s where I live, where I breathe…”

Nash, who stood by Crosby far longer than most but had recently severed ties with him, had only gentlemanly things to say about him after his death. “David was fearless in life and in music,” Nash said. “As one of his lyrics goes, ‘I’m not giving in an inch to fear.’ He leaves behind a tremendous void in terms of sheer personality and talent in this world. He spoke his mind, his heart, and his passion through his beautiful music and leaves an incredible legacy. These are the things that matter most.”

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