WEBB MASTER

Songwriter supreme JIMMY WEBB talks to Kate Clarke

Like Michelangelo’s bafflingly intricate flying machines, you might be forgiven for looking at a Jimmy Webb song on the score sheet, scratching your head and saying: “that baby’s never leaving the ground”.

Eccentric key changes, far-vaulting melodies, finely calibrated lyrics and big emotions. Of such hard-won beauty and adventurous engineering hits were once made, before our boil-in-the-bag culture got hold of music.

But happily Jimmy Webb, currently in the middle of a UK tour, has two new albums of treasures for us.

Cottonwood Farm features three generations of the Webb clan, paying homage to the songwriter’s grandfather and father, both “cotton-growing, church-going” men, and to the childhood of simple pleasures they gave him.

All of the Webb hallmarks gather for this one. The title track is a 10-minute narrative with all the potency of a Steinbeck story and all of the complex chord work and fragile emotion Jimmy has made his own. The Webb boys, Christiaan, Justin, James and Cornelius, contribute their own gifts, with naive vocals and melodies that take their cues from Van Dyke Parks and The Beach Boys.

Webb’s other release, Live And At Large In The UK, contains gems from his last UK tour. …

by Kate Clarke
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