*Dionne Warwick has no plans to retire anytime soon as the music legend is gearing up to release new music with Earth, Wind & Fire.
In a recent interview with US Weekly, the 83-year-old five-time Grammy winner reflects on career highlights and shares what’s next for the future. She also shared her thoughts on the style of current pop and R&B singers.
Warwick explained that today’s younger artists “feel that they invented show business.”
She added, “It’s a youth-oriented industry today – which doesn’t surprise me because when I was coming through, it was a youth-oriented industry. I find it quite interesting that talent is not the precedence. It’s how little you can wear, how much you can shake your body, how different you have chosen to look. It’s another industry altogether.”
Warwick also explained she doesn’t listen to the radio. “… because there’s nothing on that I want to hear,” she said.
Below are excerpts from Dionne’s candid Us Weekly interview.
You’ve had 56 charted hits and been covered countless times, but was there ever a song you wished you had recorded first?
“What The World Needs Now is Love.” When Burt Bachrach and Hal David played that song for me, I said, “No, I don’t think so,” because it had a very cowboy loop to it. I’m not a cowgirl. They took what we call the Dionne Warwick Formula, applied it to [singer Jackie DeShannon’s] recording, and she had a massive hit.
It must be funny for you to see everyone doing this country twang, cowgirl thing in pop right now.
Well, it’s funny, country folks are now putting more of a pop sound to their sound. So we’re cross-sectioning everything now. But guess what, we’re all singing the same eight notes. I don’t care what genre you want to put it in, it’s the same scale that we have to sing. There’s nothing else on the piano, but that scale. So we are just singing music, that’s all it is, music.
You broke a lot of barriers and performed in front of audiences where Black artists had never been before. You were one of the first recording artists to perform before Queen Elizabeth, the first African-American woman to perform for her. What did that experience mean to you at the time?
The first one was the Queen Mother. And I knew it was an honor to have been asked to do it. Then I performed before her daughter, Queen Elizabeth in 1968. I did that twice. It’s not only an honor, it’s a privilege, to think that first, they know me, who I am, and to request that I be a part of an event that they’re going to be at.
We lost her daughter, your cousin Whitney Houston, 12 years ago. Is there a memory of her you hold most dear?
Whitney was basically the little girl I never had. During the summer months on my tours, I would gather all my little cousins and take them on the road with me. She was one of them. Watching her grow into the magnificent artist that she became, was so pleasurable for me. She was a star.
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