Every generation gets the Dionne Warwick it deserves. In our present moment, that means we get the pithy, whip-smart, and funny Tweeter. In the ’80s, we got Dionne in a proto-chillwave telethon haze and surrealistic celeb serving as talk show host for the Psychic Friends Network (PFN), beaming into our living rooms and brains via late night infomercial. It’s so much gauze, cultural amnesia, and pillowy irony that it’s easy to forget how the first generation experienced Dionne Warwick: the ne plus ultra interpreter of the Bacharach-David songbook.

This 3CD set, The Complete Scepter Singles, should serve as a bolt to the cerebral cortex, a reminder of how Warwick could cut to the heart in a line, across generations and fanbases. (In an old Invisible Jukebox in the Wire, British free improv stalwart Evan Parker swooned over Warwick, rhapsodizing: “How long do you want me to speak for? Three or four hours?”) Even if you now identify some songs via others’ interpretations (for milennials: the White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”; ’80s kids get Naked Eyes’ “Always Something There to Remind Me”), Warwick’s pathos, magisterial phrasing, and painterly exhalations pull it all right back into the present moment to glimmer anew.

Coming in era that touted love and unity, Warwick, Bacharach, and David knew well the sadness right beneath that veneer. Songs teeter on the verge of despair (“I Say a LIttle Prayer” “How Many Days of Sadness”) or see through the illusory world (“Paper Maché”). In the early days after September 11th, my friend took solace in “What the World Needs Now,” while I turned to “The Windows of the World.” She gives voice to unspeakable tragedy and heartache, finds beauty, even hope in such despair. Almost 75 songs here, for every shading of earthly suffering.