Please see Wow Writer Trey Speegle‘s #RIP here.
God Give Me Strength was originally composed for the terrific, underappreciated film Grace Of My Heart (1996), which is about an aspiring singer who instead finds success as a Brill Building songwriter. It is inspired by the lives of Ellie Greenwich and Carole King.
The screenplay called for new songs that could pass for hits of the late 1950s-early 1960s, and some songwriters of that era were paired with more contemporary artists. This is how Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello were paired as a songwriting duo, and their work on the film led to their album Painted From Memory (1998). In the film, the song’s vocals are dubbed by Kristen Vigard and lip synched by the main character played to perfection by Illeana Douglas. However, the soundtrack recording only has the Costello-Bacharach version, which was played over the film’s closing credits.
Bacharach and I have quite a relationship. It started in 1959 with Heavenly, recorded by Johnny Mathis (there was a lot of Johnny Mathis in my parental units’ LP collection).
As a little 8-year-old, I grooved around the house, dancing and singing to The Shirelles’ Baby, It’s You. I would croon Don’t Make Me Over into a hairbrush substituting for a microphone, wiping my Beatle haircut bangs out of my eyes, as I watched my uncannily mature performance in the bathroom mirror. As a youth, I couldn’t get never enough of Dusty Springfield doing I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself and The Look Of Love (also the Sergio Mendes version!).
In my teen years, I stayed with my Burt + Dusty combo, but Dionne Warwick joined my album collection. What song could be more perfect in 1966 than What The World Need Now?
Bacharach has never left my listening orbit in the past 60 years. In the 1980s, I sang I Say A Little Prayer For You at auditions for musicals with rock or pop scores. I could sing the hell out of that song, and Bacharach’s songs are not easy to sing. I thought I was being so cutting edge and ironic to sing this great Bacharach song without changing the gender. It got me more attention than actual acting gigs.
But, no other Bacharach work is more meaningful to me than his 1998 Grammy winning collaboration with Costello, Painted From Memory. It is just one of those perfect albums at a perfect time in my life, just when I needed to hear it. The pair of master craftsmen of pop music expanded their movie project to a full album, the first for Costello after an absence of two years and for Bacharach, after an absence of 21 years. Lyrics and music are credited to both Bacharach/Costello, but I can really feel, to some degree, the melodies are by Burt and the lyrics by Elvis.
God Give Me Strength (maybe a nod to The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows by Brian Wilson?) is a song that holds real power for me. It was as if the duo of Bacharach and Costello had read my diary. I still find the entire album enthralling, magnificently sweeping. It has all the usual Bacharach touches: unusual chord progressions, striking syncopated rhythmic patterns, irregular phrasing, frequent modulation, and odd, changing meters, plus great climactic effects.
Possibly inspired by his new partner, Costello’s lyrics hit new highs on this album. He explores his familiar themes from interesting new perspectives. This House Is Empty Now has the narrator walking round an empty home, left alone by his partner and looking to face life alone, remembering the times they shared in their now deserted home. It makes for a perfect bookend to Bacharach and Hal David‘s classic A House Is Not A Home (1964), written for a 1964 film of the same name, starring Shelley Winters and Robert Taylor. The song was recorded by Warwick and was a modest hit, peaking at Number 71 on the Pop singles chart as the B-side of the Top 40 single, You’ll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart). It went on to be recorded by other artists, including in 1981 by Luther Vandross. This version was a huge hit.
This House Is Empty Now, with Bacharach conducting the orchestra and on piano and Costello doing the vocals, is sublime. It’s a true high in the art of songwriting. The lyric: “Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness?” is almost tossed as an aside, yet it is heartbreaking.
The title track, Painted From Memory, suggests that eventually even the faces of those we have loved will fade from memory. I Still Have That Other Girl is about an affair that is doomed before it starts, but I read it as about The Husband’s and my first canine, Baby Dog, who died at the time that we were first listening to Painted From Memory a lot. I wanted Baby Dog to know that I would never forget her, and that she could never be replaced in my heart; The Sweetest Punch.
God Give Me Strength has been covered by Bette Midler, Alison Moyet, Michael Ball, Audra McDonald, as dozens of others.
Now I have nothing so God give me strength
‘Cause I’m weak in her wake
And if I’m strong, I might still break
And I don’t have anything to share
That I won’t throw away into the air
That song is sung out
This bell is rung out
She was the light that I’d bless
She took my last chance of happiness
So God give me strength
God give me strength
[Verse 2]
I can’t hold on to, God give me strength
When the phone doesn’t ring
And I’m lost in imagining
Everything that kind of love is worth
As I tumble back down to the earth
That song is sung out
This bell is rung out
She was the light that I’d bless
She took my last chance of happiness
So God give me strength
God if…
She’d grant me her indulgence and decline
I might as well wipe her from my memory
Fracture the spell as she becomes my enemy
Maybe I was washed out like a lip-print on a shirt
See, I’m only human, I want him to hurt
I want him, I want him to hurt
Since I lost the power to pretend
That there could ever be a happy ending
That song is sung out
This bell is rung out
She was the light that I’d bless
She took my last chance of happiness
So God give me strength
God give me strength
Wipe her from my memory
I might as well
God give me strength
God give me strength
I might as well…
Bacharach, always so handsome he made me dizzy, was still looking good in his 90s.
We all can use a little Burt, don’t you think? We need his songs to make us feel deeply and to make us remember. It always helped that he was and still remains a real dreamboat.
“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.”
Bacharach
What’s your favorite Bacharach composition?
