Do You Know the Way to San Jose Original Singer

Heed to this track past series hit unmarried pure pop vocalist and future Solid Gilt/Psychic Friends Network TV personality Dionne Warwick. Information technology'south "Do Yous Know The Way To San Jose", her ginormous 1968 hitting song every bit written by herculean songwriting team Burt Bacharach and Hal David with whom Warwick famously collaborated during the 1960s and into the early on seventies. The song appears on her LP Dionne Warwick in the Valley of the Dolls.

Lyricist David penned the words to this song afterward Bacharach wrote the melody. He decided to write about the town of San Jose, California where he'd one time been stationed in the navy, having proficient memories of his time there. Warwick was initially unconvinced of the song'due south striking potential. After all, she was following upwardly "I Say A Trivial Prayer", yet another huge blast hit, so the force per unit area was on. Bacharach and David convinced her to record information technology anyway, and information technology scored her a third consecutive number one vocal on the Billboard charts.

Even after decades of performing information technology, and despite the success it represented for her, Warwick never really warmed to it. She considered information technology to be fluff. Yet, this song isn't all that it seems. It's one of those songs that sounds happy, merely isn't, total of all kinds of pain and heartache under its supremely breezy exterior.

Even if Hal David wrote this song equally a tribute to his memories spent in the titular city, this isn't exactly the straightest line to get there. This song isn't merely a musical travel brochure that it might seem on commencement listen. Bacharach's music that'due south characterized past his patented playfulness with time signatures and shifting Brazilian-influenced rhythms draws one's attending away from the underlying story to be plant in David's text. This song moves from starry-eyed fantasy to cold reality all in the space of three minutes. Information technology is the story of a hopeful who longs for the bright lights of a bigger city far away, who finds that life in that identify is inhospitable forcing a return to the home she knew every bit her dreams turn to dust.

In this song, fame is a "magnet that draws you lot far away from domicile", an irresistible forcefulness for those who have a dream in their eye to make a proper name for oneself. The promise of a calendar week or two, and and then the accomplishment of stardom turns into years, quickly passing and faster than one idea. Then, friendless, it's fourth dimension to return dwelling for some peace of mind, or the hopes of it. In the end, this is not a song of celebration. Information technology's a vocal of retreat, disappointment, and cynicism, even if it doesn't sound that fashion. The final line "I can't wait to get dorsum to San Jose" is intriguingly cryptic. Is the narrator really relieved to be out of the cracking large freeway that is L.A? Or, are they kidding themselves that life in their hometown is proficient plenty for her in exchange for her lost dreams of fame? The music seems to advise the latter to me.

It's interesting that Warwick found this song to be too low-cal to be taken seriously. It's as if even she was distracted by the jubilant woah-woah woah-woahs, and la-la-las that brand "Do You Know the Style to San Jose" sound so summery and light as air. Perhaps it was because she was a rising pop star with a string of hits to her proper name, insulated from the story that this vocal tells past the time she came to tape it; that fame seekers are a just i automobile each on a vast highway, generally catastrophe upwards parking cars and pumping gas instead of racing frontwards to catch the fame-game prize. Alternatively, possibly she acknowledged the darkness at the eye of this song, put off past how arguably unsympathetic the music is to the story it's telling. Who knows? Merely Dionne Warwick, I guess.

Warwick would accept several hits after this one, working with Bacharach and David up until the early seventies at which time the songwriters' partnership dissolved. She'd have a striking in 1974's "Then Came You", produced by Philly Soul magnate Thom Bell, and as well featuring The Spinners who were on the cusp of a classic period at the time. Into the early eighties, she'd have a huge hitting with "Heartbreaker", written by the Bee Gees, and featuring Barry Gibb on backing vocals. That would be yet another vocal she didn't particularly care for, somehow. Yet it too would be a huge striking. Some other high bespeak was her part in "That's What Friends Are For", a single to raise coin and awareness of the AIDS epidemic by the mid-1980s, written by Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. All the while, her immature cousin Whitney Houston was on her manner to taking the charts by storm, as Warwick herself had done twenty years before. Fame would take its toll there, too, although in a unlike mode.

After a period every bit a TV personality, Warwick was dorsum as a vocalist and performer past the early on nineties. This song. "Exercise You lot Know The Way To San Jose" would go along to be 1 of her alive staples, surrounded in informal sixties nostalgia that added yet some other layer to hibernate the thwarting and sense of defeat that lay at its center.

Dionne Warwick is an active performer today. Acquire more than about her at dionnewarwickinternationalfanclub.com.

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Source: https://thedeletebin.com/2017/07/17/dionne-warwick-sings-do-you-know-the-way-to-san-jose/

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