A songwriter as prolific, long-lived and legendary as Jimmy Webb is bound to have left a few things behind over the decades.
So it’s fitting that the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s third-youngest inductee ever is celebrating his 80th birthday on Saturday (Aug. 15) by announcing a new album, Yours For the Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb, due out Oct. 16 on Sun Records. A taste, the original demo of “Winter Clothes” that Webb pitched to Frank Sinatra, is out Friday (Aug. 14).
As the title indicates, “it’s pretty much overlooked or unrecorded, neglected in a way, music that my wife [album executive producer Laura Savini Webb] and some of the younger people around me really inspired me to go back and finish,” Webb — who wrote the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits “MacArthur Park,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston” and “Up, Up and Away,” among many other classics — tells Billboard via Zoom from Long Island. “And my children say, ‘Y’know, dad, you wrote this. This is great. This could’ve been a hit.’ So the basis of this album is rebirth, recycling that youthful energy and not letting (the songs) just molder away in the attic but to go back and flip those pancakes again and see what we can come up with. It’s very invigorating. Very inspiring…. Just ’cause I’m 80 doesn’t mean I’ve lost that fire, y’know? I may be 80 on the outside, but I’m always 18 on the inside.”
The three-time Grammy winner says “Winter Clothes” — which is presented on the album via the demo as well as a “polished up” new recording with Graham Nash guesting — dates back to the early ‘70s, and was written with Sinatra in mind. “Mr. Sinatra thought he might record it, but he thought I needed to work on it,” says Webb, who still refers to Ol’ Blue Eyes formally “because he might be listening.” “When Mr. Sinatra says, ‘Y’know, kid, this is pretty good, but I think it needs some work,’ you listen to him. He was telling me some really important stuff. I never really took that song back to him, but I never gave up on the idea. I thought it was a pretty good song, so when we decided to do this (album), it felt like it was time to bring it back out.”
That’s pretty much the case for all 13 tracks on Yours For the Taking, which was produced by Webb’s longtime collaborator Fred Mollin and recorded in Nashville, New York and Los Angeles. He wrote “If I Ever Get to Talk to You Again” — another song presented in its original demo form and in a new version featuring Beth Nielsen Chapman — after seeing Joni Mitchell perform at the Troubadour in Los Angeles during the early ‘70s. “Almost Alright Again” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” were shopped around Nashville, while “Yours For the Taking” was pitched to Linda Ronstadt, who declined to record both for herself and for Webb’s 1993 album Suspending Disbelief, which she co-produced with George Massenburg. “I begged them to let me do it, but they wouldn’t,” Webb recalls. “I guess they really didn’t like it.”
Webb took “Farther Than Eyes Can See”,” meanwhile, to Barbra Streisand — on multiple occasions. “I submitted it to her for 20 years, four times,” he says. “I would disguise it, I would put it in different (musical) costumes and run it by her again and think that by now she’ll have forgotten that she heard this before, and this time she’s gonna love it. She never loved it.”
While Webb is happy these songs are finally seeing the light of day, he also thinks that in some cases they’re overdue. “Some of the I would go, ‘I don’t know why the world is blind to this, but right now they’re invisible. The evil witch of the North has obscured it with some sort of cloaking device or something.’ I know some of these songs were hits because I was writing hits. What I have here is quite a lot of songs that I thought were hits, but other people…didn’t hear what I heard. I know I sound very strong about this, but I am 80 years old and I do know what makes a hit, what the ingredients are…although in the context of today, I have no idea what a hit is. I can’t begin to tell you. But in those days I knew.”
Courtesy of ShoreFireIn addition to Nash and Chapman, Webb is joined by other singers including Michael McDonald (“Farther Than Eyes Can See”), Marc Cohn (“The Man in the Moon”), Amy Grant (“As Long as Life Goes On”) and Justin Currie (“Yours For the Taking”). “These people are like my brothers and sisters,” he says. “We commune on a deeper level than most people do when they call their relationship with someone a friendship.” “I Miss the Mistakes,” which he submitted to Dolly Parton, features his son Cornelius Webb and Glen Campbell’s son Cal singing, playing and coproducing with Mollin.
Webb will take the new songs and the rest of his body of work back on the road in November, with tour dates in New York City (Nov. 1), Boston (Nov. 7) and Roslyn, N.Y. (Nov. 21). His official 80th birthday celebration, meanwhile, takes place Feb. 4 at the Palm Springs Cultural Center in California. “People say to me, ‘Why are you still doing this?'” Webb notes, “and I have to say because I love it. I love the feeling of singing one of my own songs. I think — I hope this isn’t just my ego, but I do think that I have something to offer in my performances. I don’t really know what my demographic is…but it’s great that they’re still there and I’m still here. I just try to raise the level of encouragement and enjoyment of life we find at this age.”
Here’s the full tracklist for Yours For the Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb.
1. Never Say Die
2. Winter Clothes (feat. Graham Nash)
3. If I Ever Get To Talk To You Again (feat. Beth Nielsen Chapman)
4. Yours For The Taking (feat. Justin Currie)
5. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
6. My Golden Girl
7. Farther Than Eyes Can See (feat. Michael McDonald)
8. I Miss the Mistakes
9. Almost Alright Again
10. The Man In the Moon (feat. Marc Cohn)
11. As Long As Life Goes On (feat. Amy Grant)
12. Winter Clothes (Original Demo)
13. If I Ever Get To Talk To You Again (Original Demo)
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