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In addition to classics like “Wichita Lineman” and “All I Know”, Webb also revisits his most recent composition, “Where Words End”. He wrote the song especially for Johnny Rivers on his Shadows of the Moon (2009) album. “I told him the story about what I’d gone through when I lost my mother”, says Rivers, one of the earliest champions of Webb’s songwriting (see For the Love of Jimmy). “I went and sat on this mountain at a place in Big Sur in the middle of the night. I just sat there and waited for the sunrise. He took the story and wrote it in a really beautiful, poetic way. He actually came out to California and played on it. It’s one of those songs that didn’t need any kind of orchestration. I loved the simplicity.”
Jimmy Webb is as fascinating a conversationalist as he is a songwriter. His answers to questions are like colorful threads of life experiences that interlace into one tapestry. Talking about “Where Words End”, in particular, not only leads to a discussion about Johnny Rivers, but also his observations about the gift of silence, the media’s obsession with disaster, and his friendship with both Richard Harris and Harry Nilsson.
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To make a long story short, I went to Johnny Rivers Music. Johnny Rivers had a big hit called “Poor Side of Town”. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” ended up as an album cut on Changes (1966). Glen Campbell was literally driving along the street somewhere listening to the radio and heard this album cut and said, “I gotta cut this song”, and ended up cutting “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”. He had a big hit with it. Then, I started getting calls from Glen saying [imitates voice], “Can you write me a song about a town?” I’d say, “I don’t know. I’ll think about that.” I ended up writing “Wichita Lineman”, which I wrote in one afternoon and sent it over to them and really forgot all about it because it wasn’t finished. I was talking to Glen a few weeks later and I said, “I guess you guys didn’t go for ‘Wichita Lineman’”, and he said, “Oh, we cut that!” I said, “Well Glen that song wasn’t finished”, and he said, “It is now!” In other words, it was kind of a gravity that pulled me into the notion of writing “geographical songs”, as we say in the trade. It wasn’t so much what I wanted to do and if you look at the body of my work, you’d see that there’s only a small percentage of songs about places in my catalog but almost all of them are hits.
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