Spinning a Webb of major hit classics
Songwriter shares fond memories
“I’m not a Luddite. I carry a Macbook Air everywhere I go,” says Jimmy Webb, over tea and croissants, “but I think the bane of computer science is that it’s allowed us to make perfect records. And I don’t think the best records, like the great ones we made in the sixties, seventies and eighties, were perfect.”
Webb grew up recording on cumbersome valvepowered equipment. Now, you can knock out a digitally pristine album on a laptop with one hand while tweeting about it with the other.
“Getting into a studio used to be like the holy grail,” he says. “We’d say, ‘You can have half the publishing on these songs if you let us record them in your studio.’ That seems insane now.” Webb laments the absence of “the human element” from contemporary recordings, though that’s hardly the case with his own live performances.
When it’s just Webb and a grand piano — it can be something akin to a triumph of mind over matter, as he mixes wonderfully circuitous anecdotes about his life in music with hairraising renditions of his best-known compositions, several of which he has rerecorded for his new album, Still Within the Sound of My Voice. His singing is fairly safe in a mid-range piece such as Wichita Lineman, but when he attempts soaring high notes he can sound like a lovesick coyote with a hangover.
Still, Webb’s primary claim to fame is as a songwriter rather than a performer. He had his first major hit in 1967 when The 5th Dimension’s recording of Up, Up And Away went to number seven in the U.S. (and won several Grammys). It was followed by By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Wichita Lineman and Galveston, all of them hits for Glen Campbell, while actor Richard Harris scored a massive hit with MacArthur Park. Subsequently, Webb has written cantatas and music for film and TV, and had songs recorded by Frank Sinatra, Isaac Hayes, Linda Ronstadt, Barbra Streisand and Art Garfunkel.
Devotees of the songwriter’s craft will find it easy to love Still Within the Sound of My Voice. It’s a shrewdly picked batch of songs with guest stars ranging from Lyle Lovett, David Crosby and Graham Nash to Kris Kristofferson, Brian Wilson and Rumer.
He recorded it in Nashville with producer Fred Mollin and a lineup of musicians who “play like a chamber group — they’re actually listening to each other, which is something else I think has gone out of style.”
It’s a companion piece to Just Across the River from 2010, and between them, the two albums amount to a summary of the breadth and longevity of Webb’s career.
Webb treasures his memories of Sinatra, who recorded four of his songs and always gave due credit.
“Mr. Sinatra loved songs and he loved songwriters. He would sit all afternoon with Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen and listen to songs. He would listen to me for two hours at a stretch, have a cigarette, have a glass of neat bourbon. He’d sit in an armchair, I’d sit at the piano and play and he’d say ‘Keep playin.’
“My name became known because guys like Mr. Sinatra would go on stage and say, ‘Now I’m going to do a song by Jimmy Webb.’”