Jimmy Webb: Words & Music
Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
WITH THE gravity-defying 'Up, Up and Away', a string of hit singles sung by Glen Campbell, and the elaborate opus 'MacArthur Park', Jimmy Webb became the prince of top 40 radio in the late '60s, and perhaps the most celebrated songwriter of pop ballads to emerge since Burt Bacharach earlier in the decade. Writing both words and music, he expanded pop's borders with songs that were elegantly crafted and lyrically vivid: 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix' was a compact three-scene short story, 'Galveston' a realistic inner monologue that was anti-war without being polemical, 'Didn't We' a blunt and rueful meditation on the crack-up of a romance.
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