In college, Burt Bacharach spent a summer studying under the French composer Darius Milhaud. Serious music; dissonant, avant-garde. Bacharach remembered bringing in something he worried was too melodic. No, Milhaud told him, don’t be ashamed—never be ashamed of writing something people can remember. Bacharach took him to heart. At a time when pop was being displaced by the impact of rock ’n’ roll, Bacharach’s music bridged the immediacy of the three-minute song with the harmonic complexity of jazz, bossa nova and film music for a sound whose sophistication was offset by an almost effortless sense of lightness. Born in Kansas City in 1928, he was raised primarily in Queens, absorbing jazz revolutionaries like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie alongside avant-garde composers like John Cage before landing at New York’s Brill Building, where he formed a partnership with the lyricist Hal David that led to some of the most well-loved songs in modern pop: “(They Long to Be) Close to You”, “Walk on By”, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”, “What the World Needs Now Is Love”, and so on. As a performer, he was charming; as a composer, he was almost unparalleled in his impact on how we think about pop today. Anytime you hear someone break down a radio hit as though it were a symphony, you can thank Bacharach; anytime you hear an artist approach seemingly creampuff sounds with commitment and rigour, that’s Bacharach, too, from Quincy Jones to Pharrell Williams and beyond. Reflecting on his process, he once said he always tried to pull back when the next step didn’t feel natural—because if he didn’t get it, he knew the listener wouldn’t either. Bacharach died in February 2023 at age 94.