And it seemed as if each one was more beautiful than the last. But you’ve never really given vent to that element." He said, "This is going to be your Nashville Skyline". Which you like to do, and which is at the heart of everything you do.
Fred said, "It’d be a chance for you to get back to your plaintive, country way of singing. The whole thing was cooked up by Fred Mollin he said I’d never actually done the Nashville experience. And some didn’t appear on Ten Easy Pieces. Jimmy Webb: First of all, they’re not all the same songs, there’s a new song on there too.
MY CHRISTMAS TREE LYRICS JIMMY WEBB CRACK
What drove you to have another crack at the crown jewels? You also revisited these songs on 1996’s Ten Easy Pieces album. Just Across The River is released on June 28.
Ultimately we reach conclusion and accord in wailing about the demise of romance in today’s world, so there’s a degree of perverse solace in that, I guess, just as there always is in listening to the best of his immortal songs. You don’t write songs like Jimmy Webb’s if you’re not on some level sensitive and vulnerable. As for 'Wichita Lineman', he bangs on about how incompetent it is. I try to get him to discuss 'MacArthur Park' but to my dismay he’s reluctant, as if these days he’s conditioned to anticipate ridicule. Attempts to draw him out on his own lyrics are countered by theses on the history of the American song. All of it is quite prickly and entertaining. Some of what he says is dated rant some of it bollocks some of it bang-on. He’s happy to talk about that for a while, but soon swerves into professorial mode, lecturing me about his craft and grumpily bemoaning the youth of today. Today he is promoting his new album Just Across The River, a country-tinged reimagining of his best-known songs, recorded in Nashville, with guest vocalists including Glen Campbell, Jackson Browne, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson and Linda Ronstadt. Webb also wrote this, in 'Scissors Cut': "'If they ever drop the bomb,” you said, “I’ll find you in the flames'/ But now we act like people who don’t know each others’ names". Anyone purporting to care about music who doesn’t "get" 'MacArthur Park' (and the two ferociously eccentric, epic albums he made with Richard Harris, A Tramp Shining and The Yard Goes On Forever) should hang their head in shame. Clearly, the baker of the cake ushered something precious to a state of readiness, but then an unforeseen twist of fate ruined this thing before it had its shining moment. The simplistic tend to consider the song bonkers, but it rallies those who love Webb to his defence. I don’t think that I can take it, it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again". He is mocked, sometimes, for writing 'MacArthur Park', in which "someone left the cake out in the rain. His lyrics speak to wounded men of unattainable women. His songs have been said to "bridge the gap between the Broadway tradition and the new existential poetics of the likes of Bob Dylan". Yet in the hands of others his material proves to be as deftly dramatic as the best of Gershwin, Porter and Bacharach. He is – and this is kind of admirable, given his material - an overwrought vocalist. Over the decades he’s tried to establish a niche as a singer of his own songs, and never quite taken it past a functional level. Webb is the poet laureate of unrequited love, the master-builder of pedestals to doomed romantic yearning. His dad gave him forty dollars and said, "Son, this songwriting thing is going to break your heart." Aged 18, when his mother died, Webb decided to stay in LA to pursue a songwriting career while his father moved back to Oklahoma. His songs have been covered by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Nick Cave and Isaac Hayes. 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix' was the third most performed song in the world in the half-century between 19. In 1967 he won eight Grammys for two songs. He also wrote 'Didn’t We?' and 'Up, Up And Away'. He wrote these great, and slightly less famous, songs for Art Garfunkel: 'All I Know', 'Scissors Cut' and 'Crying In My Sleep'. He wrote these great and famous songs: Glen Campbell’s 'Wichita Lineman', 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix' and 'Galveston' The Four Tops’ 'Do What You Gotta Do' and Richard Harris’ - or Donna Summer's - 'MacArthur Park'. Jimmy Webb, born in 1946, is somehow both an under-acknowledged cult figure and one of the most successful songwriters of all time.
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