Jimmy Webb heard Glen Campbell's voice coming out of a tractor radio in an Oklahoma wheat field when he was 14, and decided that was the voice he wanted to carry his songs. Six years later, By the Time I Get to Phoenix had sold a million copies. That kind of origin story sounds like a press agent's invention, which is exactly what Webb says — and then confirms it's true anyway. He's been making that slightly stunned face about his own career for six decades now. The new album, Yours for the Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb, is a vault-clearing exercise that could easily have been an afterthought — a tidying-up of drawers before the end. It isn't. These are songs Webb felt needed more baking, and the album's existence is partly down to producer Fred Mollin pointing out it had been 13 years since the last one. Webb describes that observation hitting him 'like a cast-iron skillet.' He's still writing songs for a third album. The man does not coast. The found-songs premise is genuinely interesting as a creative document. When you're writing three or four songs a week under marketplace pressure, the cuts that get buried aren't necessarily the worst ones — they're often the ones that didn't fit an artist's moment, or arrived too early. Winter Clothes was turned down by Sinatra, who told Webb it wasn't quite baked yet while taking a drag on a Marlboro and a shot of Jack Daniel's. Webb baked it for fifty years and it's on the record now, sung with Graham Nash. I Miss the Mistakes was written for Dolly Parton and never delivered. The vault, it turns out, had good stuff in it. What the interview captures — and what the album is presumably shaped by — is Webb's relationship to grief. Harry Nilsson, dead since 1994. Richard Harris, gone since 2002. Glen Campbell, 2017. Webb still catches himself thinking he needs to play a new song for Glen, then remembers. He's teetotal since 2002, and credits sobriety with finally letting him trust his voice, that 'little midwestern squeaky' instrument he used to drown in Jack Daniel's before going onstage to pitch songs to Sinatra and Tony Bennett. The wild drinking years with Harris and Nilsson — including peripheral involvement in John Lennon's 'lost weekend' — read now less as rock mythology and more as a survival story he happened to win. The Billy Joel story about Wichita Lineman is the best thing in the piece. Joel deconstructed the song at the Songwriters Hall of Fame, landed on 'an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts,' and Webb got tears. That's the cleanest summary of what Webb's best songs do: they find the enormous interior life of people who have no reason to be written about. A telephone lineman on a pole in the Oklahoma flatland. A soldier on a beach in Galveston. A man in a park in Chicago who left his cake out in the rain. Webb sees them the way a film director frames a single figure in a wide landscape — which is exactly how he describes his own imagination. He wanted to make films. He made songs that work like films. At 80, Webb is still touring, has a PBS special airing October 30, and has material for another record. The cultural footprint of the songs continues to compound: Kendrick Lamar sampled a jazz version of MacArthur Park on TV Off, which won best rap song at the 2026 Grammys. Nick Cave and Flea recorded Wichita Lineman this year. Alysa Liu skated to Olympic gold with MacArthur Park underneath her. The songs keep finding new bodies to carry them. He wants the album to show that 80-year-olds can still love, feel, and be sensitive to the plight of future generations. That's a political statement dressed as personal testimony, and it lands better for being personal. 'Turning 80 doesn't mean we have to sit around like lumps of coal.' He doesn't.
