Consumer Guide Album

Dionne Warwick: The Dionne Warwick Collection: Her All-Time Greatest Hits [Rhino, 1989]
Still in print, as is the label's shorter and proportionately cheaper 2000 Very Best Of, which among lesser sins omits three classics: "You'll Never Get to Heaven if You Break My Heart" (7/64), "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" (9/66), and "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" (8/68), the dates of which establish the limitations of the Alfie- and Valley of the Dolls-fueled theory that she got schlockier as she got older, which she certainly did after she moved on from Bacharach-David to Clive Davis in the '70s. Warwick had a voice that you admire like many or love like me--pop velvet with a gospel nap, the epitome of walk-on-by reserve except when amped by commitment to craft, romantic disputation, existential indignation, or her hurting heart. In the first great heyday of rock guitar, her feel for Brill Building baion enabled another kind of beat music: traditional pop with a Latin difference. Her breakup with her two mentors crippled all three for life. A