Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.” Webb immortalised the unknown telephone worker’s solitude (and imagined conversation with a distant lover) with a 1968 smash hit for Glen Campbell.
Only this year, Nick Cave and Flea recorded Wichita Lineman, Guns N’ Roses played it live and in February the octogenarian, who has three Grammys, was even involved in the 2026 awards after Kendrick Lamar’s TV Off, which samples a jazz version of MacArthur Park, won best rap song. I’m very fortunate, because I didn’t know I had a future.” He’d been “ready to hang up” his travelling shoes, “just maybe do some teaching or mentoring” when he noticed that his old friend and collaborator Art Garfunkel, 84, was booked to play the Royal Albert Hall in London. So he has carried on touring and has a new, star-studded album, his first in 13 years, after producer Fred Mollin’s gentle reminder of how long it had been “hit me in the face like a cast-iron skillet”.
The album, Yours for the Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb, contains new recordings of previously unheard songs that somehow got left behind when Webb was writing “three or four songs a week, too fast sometimes, but you feel the pressure of the marketplace.” That hustle left behind a trove of lost or unfinished songs that Webb felt could be improved. You want to take them outside and bury them in the back yard.” One such song, I Miss the Mistakes, was intended for Dolly Parton, while Webb originally penned the beautifully emotive Winter Clothes (sung with Graham Nash) for Frank Sinatra. There was something plaintive in his voice.
I thought ‘That’s the guy I want to sing my songs.’” Six years later, by which time Webb had cut his songwriting teeth at Motown, Campbell’s recording of By the Time I Get to Phoenix sold a million copies. Webb vividly remembers how Campbell asked him for a follow-up. So how does one write a timeless classic?
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting guys like Steven Spielberg and Robert Altman and have been really surprised that they were people like me. I always thought they’d have a special aura. I think I could have made films because that’s the way I see things.” Hence his many film scores, but his pop songs haven’t done too badly.
Then he got to ‘and I want you for all time’ and said, ‘Ultimately Wichita Lineman is about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.’ And I got tears, you know. Some people think songwriters go around crying all the time, but most of us are lone eagles. We think of ourselves as tough but we’re not immune.
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