Hal David, Burt Bacharach's Songwriting Partner, Dies at 91

[Ebadlun]

9. A complete artist

The trick to writing good lyrics is to make them sound so natural that it seems anyone could have said them - but to do that with the exact combination of stress accents to fit the music, avoiding clusters of consonants, thinking about vowel assonance takes real graft. And to then fit them to the complex melodies with shifting time signatures that your songwriting partner is throwing at you is something else again.

At the risk of sounding a grumpy old fart, I don't believe there's anyone in the current pop scene who can still do it.